Norton Secure VPN disconnects after being thrown out by its Firewall

Hi,

Since a few months or so I'm experiencing problems with Norton Secure VPN not being able to connect to any of its servers. It has become worse over the past week, and now I've found the culprit: Wise Registry Cleaner.

Norton Secure VPN is part of Norton 360 with its firewall always active in the background, even when being put "inactive" for a while.

As any firewall encapsulates all communication hardware (ethernet and wifi cards) and communication channels, any VPN must pass through the firewall. Hence that the firewall opens up a channel to let the VPN bypass the firewall's settings. This is sometimes also the case for printers and scanners for instance.

In the Norton 360 firewall the bypass channel is implemented in the Network Trust setting. To get there, open the Norton 360 My Norton Dashboard > Go to Device Security > Click the Open button > Click Settings (top right) > Click Firewall > First tab General Settings > Scroll down to Network Settings.

There are the Device Trust (printers & scanners) and Network Trust configurations.

So click the Configure[+] button for Network Trust. A pane pops up with at least two bypass channels, one for the Realtek Family Controller (in my case) and one for NortonSecureVPN, if all goes well, see first image below as an example.

But, when I install Wise Registry Cleaner, the bypass channel NortonSecureVPN in Norton's firewall Network Trust pane disappears instantly (VPN disconnects also instantly), leaving the Network Trust pane with just the Realtek Family Controller, see second image.

I'm talking about just installing Wise Reg Cleaner, not running it. So only installing Wise Reg Cleaner is already enough to throw out Norton VPN immediately.

I noticed that the NortonSecureVPN bypass channel is really gone, like it had never been there. And there is no way to get it back via a simpel change in a setting or a registry hack.

The only way to get the NortonSecureVPN bypass channel back in the Network Trust pane is by removing Wise Reg Cleaner and re-installing Norton 360; I restored my Windows system to an earlier point in time using System Restore.

This is what I had on my Win7 machine. I decided to post this NortonSecureVPN issue on this Win10 forum because I notice that there are a lot of similar cases with VPN connection issues on Win10 computers.

I was wondering if there are users out there with similar experience and if there is a simple way to re-instate the NortonSecureVPN bypass channel in the Network Trust pane, so without having to re-install Norton?

Thanks.