Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Problem with Ethereal 0.10.10

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 05:14:16 -0700
Ulf Lamping wrote:

I have XP SP1 and WinPcap3.1beta4 and the file in
C:\WINNT\system32\npptools.dll, and the version information states that
this DLL is from Microsoft: "NPP Tools Helper DLL" and it seems to be
part of the operating system.

To quote MSDN:

*network packet provider (NPP)*
    The Network Monitor component that collects network traffic in
    frames, and then passes the frames to an expert, and NPP
    application. An NPP uses the Network Monitor system driver
    (Nmnt.sys) to get the frames collected from the network, and
    provides several COM interfaces that pass the frames to an expert,
    monitor, and network packet provider (NPP) application where they
    can be displayed and analyzed.



You may ask the WinPcap people for help as it's almost certainly a
problem somehow related to WinPcap,

Yes. WinPcap 3.1 beta 4 uses the Network Monitor driver to handle PPP interfaces (because trying to use NDIS fails in various ways; it appears that there might be special-case code in Windows to let the Network Monitor driver handle them), so this is, as you say, almost certainly a WinPcap problem.

I *think* the WinPcap installer is supposed to install the Network Monitor driver - I seem to remember one of the WinPcap developers saying so.