I recently had a very strange problem where I was using a website similar to Teachable, and the list of courses wasn’t loading properly. I was getting a spinning wheel, which never disappeared.
For various technical reasons, developer tools weren’t showing an error, and I couldn’t work out what the problem was.
…and perhaps more importantly, neither could ChatGPT…
The other symptom that I had was that a few websites weren’t appearing, but I just had a blank page on sites which didn’t seem offensive in my mind.
I tried everything, including:
- clearing cookies and cache
- turning off firewall
- turning off virus control
- playing with weird settings in Windows which probably shouldn’t ever be touched
Other PCs on the same network worked.
There weren’t other users complaining of the same problem with this site.
I was having the problem on both Edge and Chrome.
I created a new profile on Windows where the site worked properly, but without an error message, it was difficult to know what was going on.
I thought the problem could have been caused by NordVPN, which I had installed but wasn’t working. So, I shut that down and then found that there was also a network adapter that had Nord in it, so I shut that down also.
I also cleared and flushed DNS, etc.
Anyway, without further ado, this was the problem…
I found that even though NordVPN was shut down fully and wasn’t in the bottom left of the screen either (what’s that called?!), processes were still running.
So, a Ctrl+Alt+Delete later, I was in task manager.
I did a search for nord, and found that there were 4 background processes that showed up even though the App itself was shut.
When I shut down all 4, I could access all sites properly. The offending process was Threat Protection Service. However, if I didn’t shut down the others also then this would also be reactivated.
Interestingly, when I restarted NordVPN manually, it says that the background processes aren’t running and did I want to restart them.