Quartus Licensing Issue

Recent versions of Quartus (both Std & Pro) for WIndows introduced a new problem with the license management (for node-locked licenses) which is a pain to work around.

In Tools > License Setup panel, "NIC ID",  a lot of "ghost" adapters appear now, while the normal behavior was to see the MAC Addresses of the Ethernet Adapters that show up in the device manager and in ipconfig /all. This seems aggravated by the use of the "Get no-cost licenses" button that apparently generates a license file for a (or many !) new virtual adapter(s)...

I call them "ghost" or virtual because they don't show up in the usual commands (getmac /v, ipconfig /all, lmhostid etc) and do not correspond to a physical peripheral (network card).

To make things worse, Quartus can apparently only handle a maximum of 10 (ten) Ids. The consequence is that your "real" adapter may fall out of the list and a node-locked license for this adapter becomes unusable.

The only work around I found was to use the device manager, display the hidden devices, and to disable the numerous Microsoft "WAN Miniport" in the Network cards category. This should reduce the list enough to see the "real" address used for your node-locked license.

I proposed a solution : allow the manual editing of the NIC Ids list (save in quartus.ini or registry).
But today it seems a bit hard to be heard...