Error code 0x80070035, The network path was not found

EUREKA! YAHOOO!!
"Error code 0x80070035, The network path was not found"
I found it! The cause! By George, I think he’s [I] got it!

This is my third weekend I have wasted away 12 to 14+ hours trying to find where "the dog lies buried".
Like so many (I counted thousands by now) most of the "solutions" and "answers" directions to the issue "ended up in the wrong part of town". Nothing ever resolved it. On the way to all, I learned something again about the mindset, mentality, attitudes, culture and ideologies out there on the Internet.
(Hint: when one dog pees on a fire hydrant all other dogs will go and pee also on this fire hydrant, but with barking so all know...)

As I suspected, it is good old Windows 10 style buried, hidden, camouflaged, obtuse, distributed and hidden all around settings and of course with the suspicious hard to find, if ever and if, proper documentation.

As suspected, "policies" is one of many convoluted and referencing to other settings that cause this to stop working. Upgrades being the most likely cause due to Microsoft setting authoritarian "snow plow" style in their safety and security obsession many user and policy settings back to default, disabled and/or off/on without recording and saving the last state prior to the update. whatever is "safest" for them. I smell lawyer liability-thinking behind all this, courtesy the most litigious nation in the world...

All combined in the right order and context it works flawlessly. One off, and you end up hiking around the world finding that one special missing "screw" whilst everybody tells you they have them or want to sell you something else they claim "fits and will work".

I now need now to find out which one or which combination of several settings has the profound impact creating this notorious "error code 0X80070035, The network path was not found".

I am currently disassembling my steps in the "classic scientific verification approach", documenting it for myself to artificially re-create the problem again. Then I will "reassemble" everything again to see if I successfully eliminated and solved the artificially re-created problem. Once I have verified all that, I can, like a scientific experiment, share it and everybody can create and re-create it and come to the same conclusion hopefully.

This also, that I don't give some others here the opportunity again bashing me with cynic lecturing and ridicule and chastise me as recently about something I could not find documented thus believed to be an undocumented feature and only found out by taking a risky trial & error approach possibly frying hardware. For some this was enough to "load the canons" and fire away.

Since I have to work to earn a living and Microsoft doesn't pay me to correct their mistakes and flaws, I guess I'll need about a week until I can post the results.

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”
― Albert Einstein

- - - Updated - - -

dalchina said:

Ok, uninstalled 2 updates dated 13/8, restarting after each uninstall.

5029244 and 5028166

No apparent change.
I restarted the OTHER PC, whose last update was 12/7/23, 5028166 - and networking was back.

This PC: 19045.3086; the other: 3208

Prior to that I could not even create a shortcut to the other PC.

As the other PC has 5028166 installed (which i actually an older update) my guess is 5029244 did this.

Don't bother! Reinstall your updates!
Found the culprit!

It's a combination of several "policy" settings that need to harmonize and a handful of other little shit settings, just for fun to make it more complicated.

It's quite quirky! But when it works it works beautifully!
Read my long post.

Will do "destroy & rebuild" to confirm all and then publish all soon.
I'm off now, my head is smoking.

dalchina said:

It will indeed be interesting to see your conclusion. As yet I've seen no reports of a recent update breaking networking, although that seems to have been my experience....

Hello again Dalchina,

Well, updates can, but might not be necessarily directly the cause for change. On the other hand is very likely that if an update finds a corrupted or illegal function "default" setting that it corrects it by setting it to a "correct" default. On the other hand we never fully know what we all did the last seconds before any implosions and/or if any app we installed or uninstalled or another setting we changed subsequently trigger something else unbeknownst to us.

As I go through this Windows Amazonian jungle of settings I come to realize that Windows is a very over-engineered overdone product with poor oversight management, cataloging, coordination supervisor and monitoring system. It's kind designed for the Secret Service, Fort Knox, space and deep sea operations at the global banking system....

Probably less than 5% of all users ever come close to 1/10 of a percent of all the settings. Imagine how many people would be able to handle and drive a car that would have a dashboard equal to a 1960s passenger airliner cockpit... (including the flight engineer station)
A 1960 Volkswagen beetle which most could handle, had only a speedometer and no fuel gauge. But it also got you from point A to B....

A per need modular "Lego style" approach would've been a much better solution in my opinion. Download only what you need. But, everybody got force pushed on their "submersible capable, long-distance flying feature built in Paganini super-car that needs no recharging and no gas...
But all they really wanted and needed was just a bicycle, perhaps a 10 speed bicycle...
(What do most people do with their computer? write letters and emails?)

I always thought that from an engineering point it's probably fairly well done but like most engineers they always forget what the outside world has, needs and works with. "Keep it simple, stupid". I could give you a lot of metaphorical quotations.
Certain is that the safety and security obsessions, features and settings (several hundreds if not thousands) are extensive and paramount. As "all roads lead to Rome" so do all Windows problems lead to often to security settings. 95% of all web provided solutions are winding dirt roads that actually lead to often away from Rome to a little bodega trying selling you some candy...
More and more I get the impression Windows is the embryonic fetus of the coming HAL9000. (Let's hope it'll come with no birth defects...) I know where this company and its OS is going, and it ain't so pretty. But that's a whole other story.

Error codes, including the 0x80070035, "The network path was not found" I have learned are meaningless, irrelevant misleading alphanumeric information, perhaps only helpful for the engineers who designed all. (sort of the problem is in the basement and not in the attic)
There are many examples i.e. "ntoskrnl.exe - the operating system couldn't be loaded because the kernel is missing or contains errors". Has in my experience and 99% of all cases nothing to do with the aforementioned file, which is perfectly present and intact. The "cockroach between the relay contacts" is most of the time somewhere totally different.

Too often they are as valuable and "pointing in the wrong right direction" as if you were to ask your grandmother what does 0xc000000f "An unexpected error has occurred" means.... (So there are also expected errors?)

Here's the one I came up with last night:
Windows OS is equal to a Kabuki theater but with a few thousand actors where you get no documentation of the plot or storyline but yet you should keep track Who's Who doing what, when, why and where! If you lose oversight and one part of the scene stops talking or moving you have no clue why!

It will take me a while to go through all the steps to recreate the problem, understand/see the relations and solve it again and of course document it all where the pitfalls lay. It's going to be quite a bit of writing.

So far I can say, technically it now works flawless when all the settings involved are correct. It is beautifully swift, fast and responsive.

Samuria said:

Simple answer can you connect via IP is \\192.168.2.1\sharename ?

Simple answer: no, not for a long time. (my IP range is also different but that's not the issue)
Not until yesterday when I finally found all the road blocks, none of which any of the many www advisors and fixers out there addressed.

The inspiration came when I unrelated read about Einstein in conjunction with Oppenheimer and found his quote:
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”

So I started to look at how creators of the OS think, their "culture" and were their obsessions lay.
When I'm done running through all my dismantling and recreating & checking I publish it all here.

dalchina said:

Ok, uninstalled 2 updates dated 13/8, restarting after each uninstall.

5029244 and 5028166
No apparent change.
I restarted the OTHER PC, whose last update was 12/7/23, 5028166 - and networking was back.
This PC: 19045.3086; the other: 3208
Prior to that I could not even create a shortcut to the other PC.
As the other PC has 5028166 installed (which i actually an older update) my guess is 5029244 did this.

@dalchina,

Just got news that I have to go on a business trip, leaving Friday. so my write up will have to wait until I'm back.
One thing I found is, just about any Windows 10 issue is almost always somewhere buried in the security settings and policies.

Many apps including especially Windows configuration and customization apps can change settings unbeknownst.
Today a showcase of such showed up. just for "shits and giggles":
Since Monday I've been busy with something else and not much around on my computer.
Today I started an application and got a message "service not running" so naturally I went and wanted to open up "services"(mmc.exe) to see why the requested service was not running.
Out of the blue I got this:



WTF! I'm the admin and the last and only one person working on this thing!
This is almost the classic showcase of how things subtly without further notice can change even if you're not on a computer triggered by who knows whatever.
(I always had UAC disabled because I find that the ultimate irritating annoyance.)
Again, I conclude yesterday was "update" Tuesday...
Just like during boot calling the options menu with F8 has disappeared, it wouldn't surprise me if they "updated" something and changed some "minor" settings to default again.
Other than that, how all this came into play suddenly, I have absolutely not the faintest idea.

The registry key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] the EnableLUA REG_DWORD was set to 1. Setting it to zero and reboot resolve the issue.

Maybe this thing has a life on its own and when idling and getting bored starts to play with itself with settings....!
Later,