Hi Leb,

That message is absolutely nothing to worry about. The reason why your receiving that message is because your PC needed to reinstall your LAN card because it has been put in a different slot, and is why you are now seeing "Local Area Connection 2" instead of "Local Area Connection". Your "Local Area Connection" settings are still in your registry. If you press No, at that point the dialogue will close and your settings will be saved as normal. There will be nothing to conflict with since the card is no longer there!

If the message itself is bugging you still after the explaination above, the cleanest way to resolve that warning (without messing about with the registry), go back to Network Connections, and right click and disable (if poss Delete) "Local Area Connection". You will most likely need to do this by placing your LAN card back in it's original slot for this connection to appear.

If i were to permanently remove it from my registry, what would i need to do? i would only want 1 local area connection to be present. As i want to pop-up error message to be gone permanently.

Leb, will have to check if I can list that here, it's a dangerous process, I highly recommend you take the route of placing the card temporarily back in it's old slot?

Madmonkey,
appreciate your kind gesture... but i would just like to know more about altering my window's registry, even though it possess a certain degree of haphazardness. It would also benefit me in the future, if i were to encounter this kind of problem on other computers. The method that you have highlighted would only cause the local area connection to be disabled, but my computer would still render my static ip address locked. So i would like to seek alternatives to it. Once again thank you for your support!

The registry can be accessed by going to Start, Run and type in Regedit.

Your registry keys are listed similar to the way your files are folders are listed in explorer. Before deleting any registry keys, you can export them by right clicking on a key and go to Export. The purpose of exporting registry keys before deleting them is so that if anything goes wrong or you delete the wrong registry key by mistake, at least you have a fighting chance of getting your PC back up an running again after.

For the first part, it's probably easier to search for the Local Area Connection as the key names and SSID's vary between each PC. Go to Edit, Find, and type in Local Area Connection. In the right pane, you will see Name=Local Area Connection. On the left hand pane you will see an open folder called Connection. It's the parent of that folder {SSID} you will need to export and then delete. An SSID is an unique identifier you will see in many registry folders an will normally contain {8-4-4-4-12} digits.

^ You will need to do this a couple of times to make sure there are no keys left to delete. Each of them should have a {SSID}/Connection folder. If your unsure about any, let me know.

Next, it's time to remove your current IP address from your Local Area Connection 2, and leave it as DHCP. This will help to identify the next registry key.

Back to the Registry, navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services
You will see most likely two below .NET if you have this installed, two {SSID}'s. Go into this folder, Parameters/tcpip and on the right hand pane you will see "IPAddress". If it still has the IP Address that your trying to use, this will be the one to delete. Again the folder to export and delete will be the top level {SSID} folder.

Go back to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services
and look for Tcpip. Under this folder, look for Parameters, Interfaces. Look again within the {SSID} folders for "IPAddress" to see if it contains the IP address you want to use. Export and delete the {SSID} folder.

Marked as Answered Leb.