"Charms" eh? I've seen enough roleplaying to know where this is going...

If the climate scientists don't know how the natural cycles work, how can they exclude natural cycles as the cause?

At first glance, to me this seems straight forward to fix. 1. Go into the BIOS, confirm the boot order is Optical Drive first (very important!). Perhaps even go to the extend not including the HDD in the boot order, if possible. 2. Boot from Windows Recovery CD, clean the MBR 3. Boot from a AV Boot CD (plenty of free ones avaible) to run an offline scan to, um, root out the infection. The AV CD may also be able to fix the MBR. 4. Profit? Problems with above are sourcing clean Recovery CD and AV CD, and that not all machines have an Optical drive to use (e.g. netbook), so you may need to rely on boot from USB, but again that needs the boot order setting correctly to boot from USB. Hardware write protected USB drives are useful here. And "Joe Six-pack" may not have the resources to be able to do the above for himself.

[Victim] Oh! Shiny!

*Victim is now a drooling idiot*

Or is my pattern-recognition generating a false positive?

I've been using the same Nokia M1122 for just under 7 years for my ADSL connection. Once I had the latest firmware loaded on it (within a year of buying it), and whilst I had it attached to a UPS, I think it managed to overrun its uptime counter (~160 days IIRC) 3 times, before I started using bittorrent - then the 1024 entry or so NAPT table would get overrun, and cause a reboot. After limiting the number of bittorrent connections, a lot fewer spontaneous reboots occurred.

Then again, the Nokia M1122 was a NZ$700 ADSL router in 2001.

And with ADSL2+ finally being delivered with Local Loop Unbundling in my area, I'll have to move onto another router so I can "feel the speed" - probably with the associated "crashes" to match.