Windows – Network adapter disappeared

Today I found myself in a strange situation where my Windows Server 2008r2 machine has internet connection while not showing any connections in 'network connections'. It does not show anywhere in Network and Sharing Center. The strange thing is that when I do ipconfig /all I can see the 'Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection', I can see the 'Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller' in device manager as well, without any errors. Just not in the network connections panel.

Now there is some errors in the logs:

1. (multiple times) Driver Management concluded the process to install driver NULL Driver for Device Instance ID ….
2. (once) Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller: Has encountered a conflict in resources and could not load.

So that got me thinking, hmmm what was I doing yesterday. Yesterday I was assuming the hosting company would add another NIC. I saw 3 devices with troubles in device manager:

• PCI Simple Communnications Controller
• SM BUS Controller
• Universal Serial BUS (USB) Controller

So what I did was the following, I assumed that new hardware was added by the hosting company (which was a wrong assumption) and this would be the PCI Simple Communications Controller. So I tried automatic search for driver software. This failed. Then I figured lets do it manually, and searched for the Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller drivers on the system so that it would install anyway. This failed. Then I uninstalled the driver for the PCI Simple Communications Controller again and left it like that. That's probably when the problem started to appear…

I have Admin access to the server through RDP.

So conclusion: I have a single network adapter physically, can be seen without errors in ipconfig and device manager but not from Network Connections. How do I get it back there?