Sorry you've hit this one! It looks more technical than it actually is. Error 28 just means Windows isn't telling our licensing system about your network adapter properly, which is what stops your authorisation file being created.
Nothing is broken, and you won't need to reinstall anything, most people are sorted in a couple of minutes just by copying and pasting a line or two. Take it one step at a time, and stop as soon as your plugins authorise.
1. A couple of quick things first
- Update your network drivers using Microsoft's guide.
- Turn on all your network adapters (Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth) just while you authorise — you can turn them back off, or pop Wi-Fi into Airplane Mode, once you're done. If you have an Xbox Wireless Adapter, try toggling that off and on too.
Now try authorising again. If it works, you're done — you can ignore the rest of this. 🙂
2. The fix that sorts most people
Still stuck? This next bit is almost always the culprit, and it's a quick repair.
Open PowerShell (click Start, type PowerShell, press Enter), then copy and paste this in and press Enter:
Get-CimInstance -ClassName MSFT_NetAdapter -Namespace root\StandardCimv2
- If you see a list of adapters, great — copy that and send it back to us and we'll take it from there.
- If you see "Invalid class", that's exactly what we can fix. Just do this:
Open Command Prompt as administrator (click Start, type cmd, right-click it, choose Run as administrator, this bit is important, it won't work in a normal window), then paste in these two lines, pressing Enter after each:
cd /d %windir%\System32\wbem mofcomp NetAdapterCim.mof
And that's the repair done. Try authorising your plugins again, the file should generate this time.