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#1
Can't remove disconnected (ghost) network device
Hi,
I recently had to change my motherboard, which went without any problems (from Z170 to Z270). I just updated the intel drivers and had to re-activate Windows and that's all. However, the onboard LAN on the new board didn't replace the old one (both being integrated Intel I219-V NICs) but created a new device and a new ethernet interface called "Ethernet 2" (the other interfaces are from VMware and OpenVPN):
I can't rename it to "Ethernet" because it already exists, i.e. from the previous motherboard.
So I looked into the device manager (show hidden devices option), and there it is:
The first ghost network adapter device is the non-existent NIC from the old motherboard and I can't get rid of it. If I right-click on it and select "uninstall", it shows the uninstall dialog and a progress bar and when it's finished, the ghost device is still there! Even if I uninstall the new (#2) NIC first (which does remove it), the ghost one still can't be removed (and the #2 NIC reappears after a search for changed hardware, of course).
I don't know why the non-existent NIC is so persistent and I don't want to blindly delete registry entries because I found different suggestions. I also tried netsh int ip reset and winsock reset, which didn't help. Does anyone know how to get rid of that ghost NIC?