after clearing the cmos, it booted normally, which tells me it must have been overclocked.
so, i'm going to deduce that the following happened:
1) somebody came in here and overclocked the pc
2) then they tried to update the bios to have the intel me in it
3) the pc shut down and refused to boot
i had to reflash it with a bus pirate, then kickstart it with a 600w power supply (as opposed to the 550 w supply that is normally connected to this board) to get it to turn on due to the attempt to overclock it, which caused the heatsink itself to start smoking. clearing the cmos in the fixed bios then cleared the overclock and it booted up fine.
i don't know if they damaged components or not. i'll have to try one thing at a time. i'm not in the clear on this, yet.
these idiots need to fuck off.