By 1:00 AM, the frustration had turned into a personal vendetta. He opened the Device Manager again, right-clicked the phantom device, and dug into the "Hardware IDs." He copied the string: USB\VID_0FE6&PID_9700 This was the digital fingerprint.

How to check: Open (Right-click Start button). Look under Network adapters . If you see an "Unknown device," "USB 2.0 10/100M Ethernet Adaptor," or a device with a yellow exclamation mark, proceed with the SR9800 driver first.

The is a frustrating but solvable problem. While Microsoft has deprecated native support, the generic SR9600 or USB RNDIS driver gets the job done.