OpenVPN GUI window is empty. Why can't I connect to my VPN?

I'm desperately trying to troubleshoot an issue with our OpenVPN, but whatever I'm trying, the OpenVPN GUI window just comes up blank.

I've already increased the verb directive in the config file to 9, but the window still stays blank. After about 20 seconds, I will get a message box saying Connecting to MyVPN has failed. and that's it.

I ran Process Monitor to see what the application is actually doing and I'm seeing a lot of connections to 127.0.0.1:25340, which seems to be the default managment port. But it doesn't seem like the connection succeeds.

Solution 1:

OpenVPN GUI is probably trying to connect to the management interface of an OpenVPN instance which should have already been started.

OpenVPN GUI will first try to start openvpn.exe and then connect to the port shown above. If you look carefully at your Process Monitor output, you would see a Process Create event pointing to openvpn.exe.

Sadly, OpenVPN GUI doesn't (or can't) capture the output of that process. So you're going to want to start it yourself manually. You'll then see what the problem with your configuration file is.