We are encountering an issue where the following happens:

• A PIV card is in the machine (Dell E7450 w/ Windows 8.1) and we attempt to connect to an EAP wireless network.  Normally we would be prompted for the PIV PIN in order to authenticate to the network
• We then remove the PIV card from the machine mid authentication
• Wait about 30 seconds
• Reinsert the PIV card and log in to the machine
• Attempt to connect to the wi-fi network
• The wlan autoconfig service is essentialy broken.  We will no longer be able to connect to the wireless, it will say Cannot connect, or No Networks Available.
• Restarting the wlan autoconfig service reenables the ability to connect to the wi-fi network

Speculation: Somehow forcing a failed authentication to the EAP enabled wifi network causes the entire wlan autoconfig service to be broken.

This behavior was confirmed using multiple smartcard readers (built in and usb).

The same network with Windows 7 devices authenticating in the same way does not exhibit the same behavior.

Has anyone else seen this, or does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?

Hi emooretc,

Due to the limited working environment, it is not available for us to test this issue.
The following questions will be useful to troubleshoot this issue.
Did the issue occur with all the Windows 8.1 machine or just the specific one(Please test this issue from another Windows 8.1 machine to have a check)? Are the machines up to date? Have you got any error messages or is there anything recorded in the Event Viewer (Windows Logs\Application,System and Applications and Services\Microsoft \Windows \WLAN-AutoConfig operational logs )?

If the issue only occurred with the specific machine, we could perform a clean boot to have a troubleshoot whether there is a third party conflict issue here.
How to perform a clean boot in Windows
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929135

To troubleshoot this issue deeply, we could try the following command line to capture the log:
netsh ras set trac * enable
Repro
netsh ras set trac * disable
The log is recorded in the location where you run the command.
Here is a link for reference(Pay attention to the last part, it should be applied to Windows 8.1 machine):
Troubleshooting Windows Vista 802.11 Wireless Connections
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766215%28WS.10%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

If you have troubles in analyzing the log, please upload them to OneDrive and paste the link here.

Best r