see, this is interesting.

i set the firewall to only grant access to firefox, and disabled as many of the updates tools as i could find. but, i had a hard reset this morning, and look what i found on the reboot:

those folders were created this morning; they're empty.

there would only be one way to download files, and there we have it. and, i have no idea what the "updates" were because they left no trace of themselves, which is maybe actually just evidence that they didn't happen. that is, if there was some update, it didn't update any of the system files directly in any obvious way. the update would have to be in the files that were running and saving anyways, like maybe in the registry. so, if this is a trace of anything, it's a trace of something that's been inserted into the running system, and has otherwise deleted itself. it seems to not want to get caught...

the shutdown itself seems to have been a kernel error of some sort.

i do suspect that trouble is coming, but i have no way to trace what happened, and so no way to know what to expect. i'll just have to keep an eye out for symptoms and react to them.