As many of us are doing these days, I have fully moved to Windows 8 on my PCs (laptops and desktops).  And in my role as a consultant I work with many clients, many of them use different vpn technologies.  While pretty much every single vpn client I had installed needed a trick or two to work, well Cisco’s AnyConnect vpn client had some issues.  Installation went well, no problem there.  The problem appeared when I attempted to connect, as I received the following message:

Pretty clear what the issue is, right? right??!!??

Doing a bit of research (Google knows!), I cam across the following fix:

Using our new favorite shortcut:  Windows Key + X

Then Run > regedit.

We then Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpnva

From the image you can tell there are additional characters in the DisplayName that interfere with the device being able to be correctly identified.

This is what it looks like originally.

We will remove those characters so it looks more like:

Close all open windows and attempt your connection.