ok, so i am getting a funny item in my device manager - "unknown device". i'd never seen that before, and i've looked.

i installed it and it came up as "motherboard resource".

i'm quite uncomfortable with this, but i don't know where it is, physically, on the board. 

i'm going to reimage the machine and disable it when it comes back up. but i'll need to keep an eye on what's going on underneath the hood. i think they plugged something into the board...

i know this all sounds insane, but i'm empirically driven and i have to react to the facts as they appear in front of me.

and, i really wish that cop would stop fucking smoking up there. yuck.