I have also asked this on serverfault but perhaps it is better suited to be asked here? I hope I'm not breaking any etiquette.
When producing devices that use a FTDI USB to serial chip to communicate with a Windows host, we get hundreds of COM-ports, since Windows seems to just increase the port number each time a new FTDI vid+pid+serial is connected to the PC.
I have looked into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\FTDIBUS and tried deleting the new entries that appear, but the only effect is that the COM port number is increased even for devices with the same vid+pid+serial (i.e. devices that have already been connected once).
The question: is it possible to reset this counter some way so that the enumeration starts from the first free COM port number?