I was about to bump this thread asking if anyone had any luck finding a fix yet; I was sick of having to disable my VPN every time I wanted to install or update a game. After a little extra reading through the forum, however, I am happy to say that I have found a solution.
The issue for me was the latest TAP-Windows 9.21.0 drivers which, it seems, are known to have a number of issues. I downgraded to the previous 9.9.2_3 drivers and am now getting full speed with Steam and it has fixed some intermittent instabilities that I noticed with my torrent client.
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You can find older releases of TAP-Windows here: http://build.openvpn.net/downloads/releases/ or here: http://swupdate.openvpn.org/community/releases/ .
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Now, if you want to do this yourself (at your own risk), here are the steps I took:
- First, inside of Eddie (The AirVPN software), go to Preferences > Advanced and make sure you tick the "Disable Driver Update" box in the 'Microsoft Windows Only' section on the right side, otherwise it will upgrade you back to the problematic drivers.
- I then closed Eddie completely and used Revo Uninstaller Pro to remove the TAP-Windows 9.21.0 driver (I guess you could uninstall it however you please, I just use Revo for everything out of habit). I then Installed the 9.9.2 drivers, opened the AirVPN client and connected as usual.
And that was everything. No more ridiculous saturation of my whole connection whilst only getting 100kbps download speeds .
I hope this is helpful for some (all) of you.
Big thanks to dbsantos77 for his thread here which prompted me to give this a try to begin with.
Hopefully OpenVPN are working on this. I really would prefer not to be using outdated drivers but, at least for now, it fixes my issues with VPN connections on this particular machine.