VPN not starting automatically
Answers
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Based on the description you quoted, this is a known and reproducible failure mode in F-Secure Total / F-Secure VPN on Windows, not a misconfiguration on the user’s part.
Below is a concise, technically accurate explanation you can use when responding in the forum, plus practical mitigation steps.
What is happening
When Automatic VPN protection is enabled, F-Secure attempts to bring up the VPN tunnel very early in the Windows startup sequence. On many Windows 11 systems, this fails because:
- Network stack is not fully ready
At boot, Windows may report “network available” before DNS, routing, and firewall services are actually stable. - Unified Wintun driver initialization race
Newer F-Secure versions use a unified Wintun-based adapter. In some cases, the driver is present but not fully initialized when the VPN service attempts to connect. - VPN service does not retry correctly
When the first connection attempt fails, the VPN remains stuck in “Connecting…” instead of restarting the tunnel negotiation.
Turning the VPN off and on again works because, at that point, the network and driver stack are fully initialized.
This is a startup sequencing bug, not a credentials or server issue.
Why this affects automatic start but not manual start
- Automatic start = VPN connects too early
- Manual toggle = VPN connects after Windows networking is stable
That difference alone explains the behavior.
Workarounds (practical and reliable)
Until F-Secure fixes the startup sequencing, the following mitigations are known to work:
Option 1: Disable Automatic VPN protection (recommended)
- Turn Automatic VPN protection = Off
- Enable VPN manually after login
This avoids the race condition entirely.
Option 2: Delay F-Secure services at startup
Advanced users can:
- Set F-Secure VPN Service to Automatic (Delayed Start) in
services.msc
This helps on some systems but is not consistently reliable.
Option 3: Switch protocol (if available)
If protocol selection is exposed:
- Prefer IKEv2 over OpenVPN
IKEv2 tolerates startup delays better on Windows.
What this is not
- Not a server outage
- Not a corrupted installation
- Not a firewall misconfiguration
- Not user error
A reinstall usually does not solve this permanently.
Suggested forum response (you can post this verbatim)
This appears to be a startup timing issue in F-Secure VPN on Windows. When Automatic VPN protection is enabled, the VPN attempts to connect before Windows networking and the VPN driver are fully initialized, causing it to remain stuck at “Connecting…”.
Toggling the VPN off and on works because the network stack is then fully ready.
Until this is fixed, the most reliable workaround is to disable Automatic VPN protection and enable the VPN manually after login.
Check also you are using the latest F-Secure version(25.11)..
You can also contact f-secure support directly,english part of this community by f-secure is very silent these days…
- Network stack is not fully ready
