i should note that my dns client service has reinstalled randomly a few times, which makes no sense.

i can see these little glimpses, but i need to be clear - i don't have a network card installed in the machine. 

i noticed a few months (years?) ago that my laptop was connecting to the microsoft servers....without a network card installed.

so, i mean - i disabled the integrated wired nics in the bios. the spec for the board says it doesn't have an integrated wireless (although i suspect it does and it was just shorted out on this model). i've turned off everything i can get to in the bios, and windows says there's nothing there. so, whatever it's accessing is inaccessible to me, and that's all there is to it.

but, there's something going on...