This doesn't answer your question, but can't you just get another dongle and use an ethernet switch? I have 2 levels of switches between some machines and my router and they work fine.

Another option which might cost less is to get a wireless gateway and then a couple of cheap wifi dongles.

Smells like someone cloned the BOINC installs. Remember, on first adding WCG, some unique IDs are assigned and hashed. That's what's recognized on re-connection. For sure, my multiboot, each OS having a BOINC install is never mixing up as to which is communicating over the same MAC/NIC/IP.

IIRC, long time ago asked about the MAC-Code tracking at WCG, and the reply was NO!

This work erasing does not make sense, moving the dongle, but would start by hardcoding the IP address on each of these hosts, regardless if your router is set to DHCP. [Which mine is, but has preferred IPs set with each MAC code as override, for all hosts, so there's no IP conflicts for the fixed devices, guest connections getting the leftover as determined by DHCP].

Why you want to suppress network info for the specific case, don't want to know, just that this prevents the hostname being sent to WCG. The identification is still based on the mentioned unique ID [which you can see in the event log as something like WCG.... Computer ID: 1234567]. Assigned tasks are then listed on the Result Status pages with CID... 1234567.

--Demi Wiz

That internal port should still work for any USB device. We have several systems like that at our work that have the internal USB on the motherboard. On most occasions, we use them for hasp keys, but if I plug in a USB flash drive it still recognizes it. Haven't tried an input device, but if it sees a flash drive, should see a mouse or keyboard just fine.

Told you [oh no we don't do that, proposed] to at least change one thing, because if you unplug your dongle and plug in the other machine, the router - the key in your mess - assigns probably the same IP.