I had 2 NIC's in my PC - One on the motherboard and one a USB attached 54G Wireless Adapater. Both were working fine.

I disabled the on-board NIC and installed a PCI Card NIC, which was working fine until I plugged the USB Wireless NIC back in. This was detected as normal and by the correct name, but insisted that it needed drivers to be installed (even though they were there). I ran through the new hardware wizzard, it found the drivers and installed them but on pressing finish it said that it "Cannot Install hadrware ..." and promptly re-detected the USB NIC and repated the process. After the 5th attempt I gave up.

Now the PCI NIC which was working perfectly will not get an IP Address via DHCP. So i tried a static address. This appeared to work, but could not actually communitcate externally. Each time i re-check the IP Configuration the static IP address has dissapeard and at next re-boot it will try and fail to get an address via DHCP.

So I uninstalled and physically removed the PCI NIC and re-tried the USB Wireless NIC - same problem.

I re-eabled the on-board NIC and it got exactly the same problem as the USB Wireless NIC (asked for drivers, drivers failed loop).

I tried completey re-installing all relevant drivers and nothing solved the problem.

There are some tcpip system events in the event log (not got details to hand as on someone else's PC) that indicate that Windows is having problems adding adapter entries to the registry.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how to resolve this issue?

Remove all network related stuff from Device Manager, shut down the computer and then physically remove all hardware network devices. Startup the computer without the devices.

Shut down the computer, insert the network device of your choice. If it does not find the driver, let it install what it will and then open the device manager and let us know what you find relating to network hardware.

You may or may not need to disable any integrated NIC you find in the bios.