This is an interesting question and I would be very grateful for any help. I'm working in a government university in Thailand, and the IT systems here are pretty rough and ready. There are several devices with the same IP address as my computer, and so I regularly (every 10 minutes or so) get the following error message: "Windows - system error There is an IP address conflict with another system on the network" I've had this problem for a while now, and it can be fixed by clicking 'repair LAN connection' . I've asked IT to fix it; they are very slow to do anything. They also don't speak English. Eventually they came round to my room, searched for other computers using my IP address, and disabled one of them from using the network. It seemed to fix it, but the problem started to return with increasing regularity. Now it's back every ten minutes. Through a bit of research I have worked out exactly what needs to be done to solve the problem (from my perspective, not from the perspective of getting the network running smoothly - that's not my job), and have written a batch file to automate fixing it. Here are the contents: arp -d * Pretty simple. So whenever the error message pops up, I just use a shortcut key to run this batch file, and the problem is fixed. I'm wondering if there is any way to totally automate this process. If there is any way that when the system error messages pops up, this command can be automatically run, so that I don't have to do anything and my work is not interrupted. If it could supress the system error message appearing at all, that would be the icing on the cake. I know that this is a bit of a rough fix and I really should get back to IT, but it's teaching me something about computers in the process, and stops me getting insanely frustrated with people who are full of promises but don't actually fix things properly. The fact that I have to explain everything to them in my shaky Thai makes it all even harder. Thanks.

If I were in your shoes, I might be tempted to try to find another ip address in the same subnet that's not being used by another system and just change to it. I/T obviously isn't keeping close track of them anyway, otherwise they'd jump on a duplicate address and fix it. Since that's kind of an underhanded approach I'd save it as a last resort. Instead of getting I/T to find and disable the duplicate ip address, have you thought about just requesting a new ip address? Sometimes it helps to approach the problem from a different direction...

Thanks very much for the suggestions. I will try requesting a new IP address from IT. (I tried to change it myself, but it doesn't seem to work. I don't think they're letting us choose our own IP addresses.) It would be good if I could sort the problem properly... but I'll post again if I have no luck with IT.