It would seem that having the app installed at all, even with the firewall disabled, prevents certain NordVPN servers from functioning correctly. Examples of this are servers: Canada #244 and Canada #173.
Uninstalling lets you use either the app to connect to those servers or Windows’ built-in IKVe2 VPN connection. Installing Glasswire while connected boots you off and prevents you from communicating with any servers through the VPN. It would seem that GlassWire Control Service is specifically to blame as a few minutes after it’s stopped, the connection resumes working even if the app is open.
This is kind of an issue since I wanted to use both services together, and the servers I listed happen to be some of the closest to me with the most stable and lowest ping.
Sorry if the wording is off, you’re clearly not blocking them, but there is a clear conflict that prevents NordVPN from functioning normally due to some interaction with GlassWire. I would hope your devs have a check for whether the NordVPN app is open and have that setting change dynamically in the future so people like me won’t need to go through forums and tech support to get this stuff figured out.
GlassWire just does nslookups on hosts, so the change you made disables nslookups with GlassWire and that solves the issue. We don’t block anything.
It looks like though that maybe Nord is phasing out this behavior with nslookups since only a couple of servers are still having the issue. Also I haven’t seen this reported lately so maybe this issue is going away permanently due to changes on Nord’s side.
They are a cool VPN service and we agree it’s important GlassWire should work with any VPN and that’s why we did this customization of our software for Nord users.