phantom nic

WindowsXP Pro on a peer to peer network with WindowsME is causing problems. The XP machine keeps adding a phantom or non existant network card which it tries to use and then locks up both machines. We have tried removing the phantom nic and it keeps adding it back either on reboot or sometimes almost instantly it re-appears in the device list. Has anybody seen this before? Any suggestions?

Thanks for your input.

 

The normal RX for that problem is to uninstall all the networking components and then reboot and let Windows discover them again. This used to happen with modems with W98, I had a client that had about a dozen modems in his Device Manager. At times, I've actually had to delete all the network stuff, power down, remove the NIC, power up and boot, then power down and reinstall the NIC and put stuff back together.

 

What is the name and type of the phantom NIC? Would it happen to be something like netwrk bridge or IEEE-1394 network adapter?

 

I had a similar problem with a video card, went to safe mode, remove both of them and rebooted to normal mode. Reinstalled the video card and fixed the problem.