When it comes to desktop Twitter clients there aren’t many options. If you’re looking for a freebie there are even fewer choices. TweetDeck is far from perfect but it’s one of the better desktop clients available and it’s the one I’ve come to rely on when I’m not using my iPhone or iPad. Back in October I upgraded my pc’s to Windows 8. After reinstalling TweetDeck I was confronted with a fatal error; TweetDeck failed to login to my account and displayed the error message “Unable to connect. Please check your network.” Tweetdeck connection issues are not limited to Windows 8. I’ve seen similar issues on Windows 7 — but this was the first time the issue failed to work itself out. I tried reinstalling TweetDeck. I tried manually setting firewall rules for TweetDeck. I tried running TweetDeck as Administrator. Nothing resolved the error. Weeks after installing Windows 8 I was still without my precious TweetDeck. Since there wasn’t an update to address the issue I decided to investigate where the hangup was occurring. It turns out the problem is easy to resolve. Security changes to Windows 8 have left TweetDeck without the ability to validate ssl certificates associated with the Twitter API. All one has to do is use Microsoft Internet Explorer to validate the certificates. Then TweetDeck will function normally again!