it took me several tries, but i was able to flash the motherboard for the production pc using the bus pirate, which allowed the device to boot up, with a caveat: the motherboard started smoking.

i don't know what happened to the board. i know that i woke up and the machine was off and it looked like somebody ripped the power out of the socket.

did somebody overclock the device?

i'm going to try to clear the cmos and see what happens, but it's smoking in the heat sink (the one connected to the chipset, not the one one the cpu) without any obvious sign of actual heat, so it might be fixable.

if not, i can buy a new board, if i can get the cpu out.

however, this has just gone from very weird to very suspicious.

ten minutes later, somebody knocks on my door without notice (not allowed.) and i can hear all kinds of smashing around upstairs. it sounds like somebody is moving the appliances out.