I’m on the train this morning, and Virgin Trains Wi-Fi works with the iPass service that my company uses for roaming Wi-Fi connectivity.  Unfortunately, iPass didn’t want to play this morning – but I found a fix…

The error message displayed said something like “An important service (client service) failed to load. Please contact your administrator”.  So I opened the Services console (services.msc), sorted by startup type and looked for Automatic services that were not showing as “Started”. Sure enough, one of these was iPlatformService (described as the iPass iPlatform Service and components”).

With the iPlatformService started, I could successfully connect to the on-train Wi-Fi. I still can’t get a VPN connection but that’s not related to iPass.  So it looks like I’ll have to drive to the office to empty my Outbox (and please don’t get me started on how Outlook Anywhere has been available since 2003 and using a VPN for email is outdated…).