ok...i aint never seen that before, but ill take a crack at it...have you scanned for spyware yet? but you said that you seen that in the bios too....weird.
possibly, but it only does that in the os, as far as i understand, it dosent do it in the bios, tho it did. can you strip the system to bare essintals and run it, to see if its still there? before that tho, try restoring further back, like a week or so