i was able to track the blue screen down to a device driver set to reboot upon fail, which i'm willing to claim is an error on the manufacturer level, although that might be my microsoft training speaking. it was a driver related to the motherboard.

the thing is that i've taken this hard drive out of the laptop and had it boot in the pc before, so there wasn't any reason to think this would happen. further, the issue was not related to a missing driver - windows was able to find my hardware and boot into it just fine. in a scenario where windows has all of the right drivers available to it, it should be able to find the right ones and correctly boot - and it did. so, you shouldn't have to worry about removing the wrong drivers, so long as the right ones are accessible - and, technically, i didn't have to do that, either. but, somehow, this driver - which is needed to boot the laptop - got set to "reboot on fail" rather than "ignore on fail", and it was blocking the boot.

what should have happened is that the boot process should have found this driver, said "we don't need this" and just tossed it aside, then found the right driver and booted - that was my assumption, and what a properly installed driver does in this scenario. but what actually happened is that the boot process found the driver, said "i can't use this", stopped looking for something it can use and tossed out a blue screen.

the answer was to change a specific value in the registry from 3 to 0. that's it. it boots on the pc, now.

it doesn't answer why the laptop wouldn't boot, though. i'll have to figure that out tonight.

i've filed the complaint with the privacy commissioner online, rather than mail it. so, that's done. and, i'll have to get on with the calls on monday.