If I specify an IP address in my connection string, after the
connection is made setnet32 has been changed to use that hostname
instead of the default.

Is this is what's intended?

Our environment is such our production and test servers have the same
name, but are on different machines. This lets the development staff
use one hosts file and the production users use another. I'm writing
an app which attempts to compare database tables for verification
between the test and production environments. So I would want to
connect to servername@10.0.0.1 and servername@10.0.0.2 at the same
time; but this seems impossible.

Is there a way to NOT update the registry/setnet as a sideeffect of
connecting with an alternate hostname?