This is the way.™
This is the way 
Specifically, which keys have to be merged into the new installation’s registry? The official Plex support article mentions only the ‘Plex Media Server’ key from the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive but that contains just a handful of values. I’m struggling to get my second, newly installed ‘clone’ PMS up and running (on a second Windows OS on a multi-boot machine – it’s not a separate PC) and after reading this thread and doing an exhaustive search of the registry I see that there are many, many more values in the ‘Plex Media Server’ key within the HKEY_USERS hive, under the SID that corresponds to the user that the server runs under.
I assume that if I want to merge this key into the registry on the second Windows OS, I need to first search and replace the SID in the .reg file to make it match the SID of the user who will run the server . . . if you follow my meaning.
To be clear, I’m not trying to create a second, different server: I want to replicate my existing server, with all it’s libraries, settings, name, users, etc, etc, against the day when the original install is shut down for the last time (the second Windows OS is 64-bit, the first is 32-bit and various software vendors look to be abandoning support for 32-bit applications so I’m reluctantly migrating to 64-bit despite using no applications that benefit from it and despite the performance hit).
That might be so on a newly set up server installation.
But on a machine which has been running Plex server for longer, there are about 30 values at least.
Keep in mind that HKEY_CURRENT_USER only holds the data of the currently logged in Windows user account.
If your plex server has been running under a different Windows user account, its data are in one of the other user hives underneath HKEY_USERS
Respectfully, no – not on my machine anyway. The server runs under “me”, the main user of the machine, and was originally installed about eight years ago. When user “me” is logged on, the content of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive is as follows:
In the HKEY_USERS hive – under the SID that I have confirmed corresponds to the same user “me” – the content is:
The above image does not show the full content; there are some 64 values in all.
There are ‘Plex Media Server’ keys under other SID in the HKEY_USERS hive but, with one exception, they contain just a ‘Default Language’ value. The exception is the SID for the account used to install software (my account is not in the Administrators group), which contains several values; these are mostly – but not all – the same ones that are in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive; I guess these were created at installation time and/or during server updates? I wonder, should these too be merged into the new installation?
The second screenshot looks more like the correct one.
Did you by chance run the registry editor “As Administrator”? Because then it would show you the wrong branch under CURRENT.
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D-oh! You’re right. Didn’t realize regedit worked like this, always assumed that HKCU represented the logged on user, and that entering admin credentials just gave a temporary elevation of authority, allowing changes to be made to other hives like HKLM. You live, you learn.
Merged the correct registry key and voilà! – server up and running without the dreaded yellow hazard triangles all over the navigation pane 
Thank you very much for your help 
How would I swap the IP addresses?
You switch the network adapter from automatic IP acquisition (also called “DHCP”) to manual.
Then type in the new IP address.
You need to make sure that a certain IP is not used by two different machines at the same time
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