I've installed Vbox 4.2.16 on W8.1 prev.
The fixes they mention are for guests and the host still has those networking issues.
Well, after removing 4.2.14, the weird networking drivers still remain on the list even if VirtualBox isn't anymore: so the vbox bridged networking also exists without VBox!
It's womething we didn't see up to Win 8.0... Are this compatibility issues, driver related?
Then during the install of 4.2.16, the installer mentions that you need to rename the existing adapter since no (adapter) duplicates are possible... it's clear somewhere there will be duplicates.
The preferences window @ the networking tab has duplicates and removing one of them is allowed BUT the initial one (with issues) still remains and is not possible to remove it!
From this point, the only way I figured to remove the VBox networking from taskbar is to disable or remove the driver's entry in
Autoruns for instance, and reboot.
There can be more than one VBox* name here... to be unchecked or removed... removed because Device Manager already mentions a corruption in the Registry (see below).
NOT RECOMMENDED the next step:
I looked (or rather say messed) in the Registry in searching the adapters and they can be found indeed but removing some of those entry's messes with the entire networking system (for instance the entire 'Airplane Mode' option was removed from the list).
What I see here is that after some modifications brought in 8.1 preview, the VirtualBox installer is unable to remove previous adapters (this is also an upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1 while VBox was installed) and VBox networking drivers are less compatible than expected... and problematic devices will appear in Device Manager which are not possible to remove or they will be very hard to do even if possible.
For the moment, try to keep those duplicate adapters if you use 8.1 preview as VBox 4.2.16 will not bring much improvement to the hosts. This later version is the best we have but if we used older versions before, we still need a proper way in cleaning those drivers issues. As already mentioned in this thread, using VMware Player will spare you this kind of misery until a VBox fix is available (which I still believe will be out pretty soon, probably in the next version. )