When v2rayN starts it listens on two local ports: 10808 speaks SOCKS5 and 10809 speaks HTTP. Traffic through either port takes the same node; only the protocol differs. The "system proxy" switch simply points the Windows proxy setting at 10809.

Why you still have to type the port

Not every program reads the Windows proxy setting. Command-line tools in particular ignore it: Git, npm, pip, curl and Docker all need their own configuration. When one of them cannot reach anything, do not blame the node first — it is usually just not going through the proxy.

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The usual incantations

git config --global http.proxy http://127.0.0.1:10809
npm config set proxy http://127.0.0.1:10809
set HTTP_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:10809
set HTTPS_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:10809

Applications that speak SOCKS (Telegram, several download managers) want host 127.0.0.1, port 10808, type SOCKS5, username and password blank. For Git over SOCKS use socks5h://127.0.0.1:10808; the trailing h tells Git to let the proxy resolve DNS, which also keeps lookups out of a poisoned resolver.

When the port is taken

If the v2rayN log shows address already in use, something else grabbed the port. Find out what:

netstat -ano | findstr 10808

The last column is the PID; match it in the Details tab of Task Manager. To move the port, change the local listening port in the parameter settings — and remember to update every place above that still references the old number.

When you are done, clear the settings again (git config --global --unset http.proxy). Otherwise those commands will hang on connection timeouts every time v2rayN is not running.