so, i passed out last night after i took a shower and have spent most of the day sleeping. i decided i needed to catch up on rest.

but, i'm struggling with how to approach this. as much as i want to bitch about not wanting to spend my time troubleshooting driver issues, it's obvious that what i'm doing isn't working.

unfortunately, i've reproduced the issue on the pc without connecting to the internet, so whatever's going on seems to be in the registry or otherwise exists locally. i'm still convinced that the reboots are being triggered remotely. but, the bad driver is already on my system, and whatever's triggering it seems to already be in the boot sequence.

so, i may have to rewind to an older image, which means backtracking on the server issue.

if i can get a basic linux install on this thing, then i should be able to launch xp in a virtual machine and that might be good enough.