I had an issue this morning that is new to me. I'm throwing it out just to hopefully get some thoughts from others. If I get an answer I will consider this my lucky day. Thanks. So, I use PIA on personal laptop running up to date Win10. My anti-malware is the stock Windows Defender. I know, but this works for me. I have PIA set right now to connect to VPN in Texas and that is the way I started out this morning. I was connecting to wifi at a automobile dealer's service waiting room. Usually PIA connects within a few seconds. I don't ever remember having to wait. I use this laptop all over the place on wifi in hotels, airports, office buildings and conference centers... I use this a lot, and have been doing it a while. But this morning at the dealership PIA was sitting on connecting and never completed the connection. I know* wifi was connected. I tried disconnecting from wifi and connecting again. I disconnected PIA and manually connected again. I tried three or four different PIA server locations. I restarted the laptop. I did a cold shutdown and started up again from scratch. I waited maybe a minute for PIA to connect. Now I'm home on my wifi and all is as it should be. What are the real world possibilities? I wondering if there was something non-standard about the wifi that was causing a problem with PIA. Is it possible there was something intentional going on to defeat VPN by keeping it from connecting? I'm totally ignorant on this and wondering what could be going on. As I say, I travel a lot and use this laptop on public wifi with this VPN a lot, and this hasn't happened to me before. Thanks again. * How did I know? I don't like it, but there is some time gap between the connection to wifi and the moment PIA says it is connected. While paying attention during troubleshooting this issue, I observed that Box Drive and Microsoft's One Drive, and the Proton Mail Bridge were connected. When I would disconnect from the wifi these would in turn disconnect. Connect to wifi again, and these would indicate that they were connected. I assume then that the laptop was connecting to the internet when it showed connected to the wifi. However, I never launched the browser or email client. I was just observing these particular services in the hidden icons popup.
