I upgraded to Windows 8 (from Windows 7) several months ago and one of the things that stopped working is the Cisco VPN client. As of this writing, the most recent version is 5.0.07.0440. This build installs properly but fails when you try to establish a connection. I found a solution wanted to share it since it’s been working great for over 3 months without an issue.
1) Close the VPN client, make sure it’s not running.
2) Open up regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CVirtA
3) Make a backup of this, just in case. Right click the CVirtA key in the explorer and export the settings for this key as a reg file.
4) Edit the DisplayName value, stripping off the characters until “%;”. For example…
For x64 you can change the value from something like “@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows” to “Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows”. For x86, you’ll change the value from something like “@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter” to “Cisco Systems VPN Adapter”.
5) Open the VPN client and try connecting again
6) If this doesn’t work, restore your original settings by double clicking the reg file you saved in step 3.
Special thanks to Raman-MSFT from this MSDN post for this solution!