renumbering computers and disk drives

So under %appdata%\.minecraft\saves\%save\computer is lastid, lastid_computer and lastid_drive. You can go in and change the number in the file and in older versions of CC you could do this and it would take effect without restarting the world or game. In the latest version, it seems that not only does this no longer function regardless of restarting the world or game, but also that computers and drives may have duplicate ids and especially when connected to a wired network, the modems themselves will also have these duplicate ids. Does anyone know of a way to resolve this? Thanks

I have been experiencing something similar. The ID of drive 0 just became 1 after world restart.

I suppose the quick answer is "don't do that" - if you need to identify computers and drives on the network by specific names, use rednet.lookup() or disk labels.