How to remove duplicate device drivers?

At some point unknown to me, possibly after a BIOS flash, I ended up losing
my network device object in Device Manager and in its place I now have a
"Network Device #2". The whole #2 designation alone was enough to drive me
nuts, but now the original Network Connection icon of "BellSouth.net" (my
ISP) is also gone and in its place is "Local Area Network 3". When I try to
rename LAN3 back to BellSouth.net, I get an error stating it cannot be done
because a connection with that name already exists.

So... obviously, the network connection "BellSouth.net" is undoubtably
linked to the original network device in the Registry. I went rooting around
in the Registry and found all the driver references I need to delete so I
can reinstall the drivers and solve this problem altogether.

However, there is one more problem. The area of the Registry I want to edit
is apparently System-access only. The Administrator account can't delete the
key... or even modify it, for that matter.

So, my question is, how in the hell do I remove and clean out the network
device drivers and their associated keys in the Registry?

I have tried the obvious like uninstalling the device and deleting the
drivers, but because of the keys in the Registry, when it is reinstalled, it
becomes "Device #2" again.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!!