Hello, I'm running a Server 2008 R2 Enterprise SP1, I have connected a wireless NIC to it, which was immediately recognized and the drivers were installed automatically, however, it was disabled and trying to enable it didn't seem to do anything. At that point the server started hanging so I removed the wireless NIC and restarted the machine. I found that I could no longer go into places such as Network and Sharing Center or Computer Management without causing the server to hang, also the interfaces notification icon itself hangs right after it shows up and takes the entire notification center with it. I have tried removing the drivers for the wireless NIC and the drivers for the regular NIC and reinstalled the drivers for the regular NIC, everything still hangs and I have no network. I also tried replacing the NIC with a different NIC, it still hangs. Safe mode with networking seems to work fine (at least there are no hangs), however, after setting the NIC up with a static IP address, I verify it with ipconfig and everything seems fine. I can even reach the network and ping other machines, but when I disable and enable the NIC, and run ipconfig again I seem to get an APIPA address on the NIC, even though it's set on a static address. I've tried reseting the IP settings with netsh, I've tried looking for defective system files with SFC, it didn't help. The log files don't appear to show anything of interest, all the errors in there are due to the loss of network connectivity. Anyone has any ideas? I'm afraid i'm not even sure on where to go next in troubleshooting this.

Have you tried removing the NIC's from the Device Manager?