VirtualBox – Network Adapter Fails to Install on Windows 8.1

The thread Bridged Adapter problem suggests that the problem is the network MaxNumFilters limit in Windows.

By default, the MaxNumFilters value is 8. You can change it up to 14, using regedit in this location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network, value of MaxNumFilters.

Note: If you don't see MaxNumFilters, you can create it with the Type of REG_DWORD as shown below :

If after this change you still have the problem, then while leaving the value of MaxNumFilters as 14, uninstall VirtualBox, reboot, then reinstall it.

It seems that few people have needed to reinstall the host virtual adapters (or at least if they did, they just resorted to reinstalling VMWare instead of just the adapters), so it’s no surprise that there are very few references to fixing it. Fortunately, it has come up and a solution does exist.

What you need to do is to use the vnetlib utility (it should be in the VMWare installation directory).

Someone on the VMWare forums has attempted to document the vnetlib command and another tried to use it to add the host virtual adapters.

Ulli Hankeln has done an even more through job of documenting vnetlib at his Sanbarrow site (which basically, is the online VMWare bible). He also lists a few other ways to manage the network settings.

Anyway, what you can do is to manually reinstall the adapters by using the add adapter argument to vmnetlib, and then managing all the settings, but it’s much easier to just reinstall the VMWare network services:

> vnetlib.exe -- install devices