what am i doing?

i slept most of the day, was up around 11:00. my plan to carefully rebuild the image by copying one thing over at a time failed as i faced a mismatch between the user files in the fresh install and the archived one. so, i'm going to have to plow through, instead. 

i'm convinced that the thing that broke the install was a permissions issue, so i've added an extra step to the rebuild, around resetting the permissions from the install disc before i boot back up. i'm hoping that this is the "correct " way to get rid of these extra user permissions, which i suspect may be granting the authority to run the background scripts.

at this point, i am relatively convinced that there is not a worm in the classic sense on the loose, as it would have infected the various drives and bioses, and there's no sign of it. when i reboot, i'll need to check to see if i see any sign of the funny semaphores before i go to the other machine. 

if i convincingly test this and come up with a clean pc, and then get infected almost immediately upon installing it back into the laptop, it's clear enough what the answer is, and what the next step is.

that's where i'm leaning right now...i just kind of have to show myself the truth of it....