In reply to:

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The only way it could be an issue is if someone else had also created an ad-hoc address group that matched yours, and then only if the individual addresses conflicted. And that's highly unlikely. And even if it did, you'd know instantly because you'd get an error message and then you could just pick a different digit.

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This is the bit that causes me problems - suppose the address I've been allocated at home is the same as one allocated to somebody else at work. If we weren't on private addresses, this wouldn't happen, as normal addresses are assigned uniquely. But private addresses are allocated independently on each network; that's fine as long as long as the two networks don't come into direct contact. Moving a machine with a configured (non-DHCP) address from one net to the other in effect brings parts of the two networks together - there's a risk of conflicting with someone else's assigned address. Not that unlikely on a network like ours with thousands of private addresses, many of them DHCP allocated (so what happens to work today could fail unexpectedly later).

I know I would probably not notice if somebody else were assigned the address I was using - well, not until I tried to upload tunes or read the serial log, which could be several days. In the meantime, the other user would be giving lots of grief to IT Support. And they aren't the type to take abuse and hold onto it...

Anyway, this issue is solved (thanks, Mark!), so I'll set it up and forget it for a while.