OK, looking at the screenshots I see that you are using MIDI2 connections instead of Bome Network native connections. First of all, make sure you set up your preferred connection time to Bome Instead of MIDI 2. In Settings (Gear ICON) go to Networks settings and and make it like this. This will make the preferred connection as Bome MIDI instead of MIDI 2.0 which acts quite a bit differently. Do this on each machine. Then make sure you click "Forget on any MIDI 2 Network connections on the main screen,
This is what a MIDI 2.0 connection looks like:
And this is what a Bome Network connection looks like:
Then go to the setting again (gear ICON ) and select Virtual Port settings.
Turn off these switches. This will ensure virtual ports disappear when disconnecting and then they should re-appear when they are present, Again, turn these off on both machines.
Hopefully I addressed your first issue above. If not, you might need to remove the re-appeared ports in the Virtual MIDI port Menu. by clicking edit and then delete for any that you don’t want.
If they show up again, you may need to shut down Bome Network, then delete the settings file, and then restart Bome Network. If you do this you may need to redo some of the settings I showed above as when the settings file is gone, then Bome Network will create a new one with the default settings.
The location of the settings files are described in this post.
With Bome Network instead of MIDI 2.0 connections, the other non-virtual ports should no longer show up at all.
Bome Network Version 1.7 is the first version that has MIDI 2.0 connection type so indeed you should see different behavior on 1.61. I will suggest that the default preferred connection type excludes MIDI 2.0. This will make it easier for users that are upgrading from 1.61. With that said, there are some features that I like about the MIDI 2.0 connections and that will help make things future proof when we start seeing MIDI 2.0 devices and applications.
Steve Caldwell
Bome Customer Care
Also available for paid consulting services: bome@sniz.biz