so, i seem to have come up cleaner than i expected to.

the thing that i did immediately before the update, which i know happened after 14:00 due to the timestamp in the catroot directory, was clear the registry out of an rdp listener that was running at startup, and for who knows how long. it was just corporate microsoft listening software, for like a domain server, which goes together well with the general feeling that the laptop has been slaved to a domain, somehow. i cleared out the executable and a number of drivers with names that i didn't like, and i suspect in some subset and combination were being utilized by the executable. so, you could imagine that i thought that the registry was a likely cause. but, replacing the registry didn't recreate the bluescreen; it was only being recreated when i removed specific nt* files from the f-key in the catroot directory. 

so, i saved my registry, actually, and everything that was in it. that means this should hopefully be quicker to reconstruct. all the missing services are already gone, for instance. the firewall might even still be in place.

i'm also toying with a naturalistic explanation to that update process. the one thing that i do always run when i come up is the activation plugin, which insists on connecting to the internet via firefox, but it always errors out. if the activation process utilizes firefox as a download manager, and it is the default browser, then that could explain the traces of hex - and could explain why it's erroring out in the catroot, or what it's doing running an update at all. i was able to verify that the activation process does utilize files in the catroot folder.

that's not what these files in the catroot directory look like though, they look like server files. 

i'm going to try to put this back together as best as i can, then. hopefully, it's not too long.