Just like everyone has that “I forgot to back up and now my ass is in a sling” story, lots of folks who have learned from those experiences have at least one “My ass was in a sling but I had backups that saved the day” story.

That just happened to me.

I was working on a product demo that required the installation and use of the Loopback Network Adapter to ensure the demo wouldn’t come up on the local network, only my machine.

So I installed it, did the demo work, and went home for the day. Everything was peachy.

Got in this morning, booted up, and none of my networking connections worked - only the Loopback Adapter. I tried to disable it, but it wouldn’t disable. Everything was hosed. I tried several things, including attempting to disable/re-enable all of my network connections and removing the Loopback Adapter completely. Rebooted several times over the course of that with no luck. And then…

…System Restore saved the day. There was a system checkpoint saved from yesterday morning and once I restored to that point, everything was back up and running, minus the stupid Loopback Adapter.

Thank you, Microsoft, for bailing my ass out.