Symptoms

I am running Switch 12 or higher on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and all network communication on my system has stopped after running Switch for a while. This results in a ‘Switch Designer can’t connect to the Switch Service’ message in Switch and can also result in errors from other applications installed on the system which can’t make a network connections anymore. I had to reboot the system to resolve the issue.

This issue doesn’t happen on Mac, is not triggered by Switch versions older than version 12, and doesn’t involve any crashes of the Switch Service. 

Cause 

We made some changes in Switch 12 which might trigger an existing problem in Windows that results in network communication failure. The Switch Designer uses network communication to communicate with the Switch Service, therefore you receive a ‘Switch Designer can’t connect to the Switch Service’ message.

Solution

Microsoft has provided a hotfix for the problem and our testing confirms this hotfix resolves the issue. Please, download the hotfix from the following page and reboot the system to resolve the issue.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2577795