Striker Extreme Ghost in the machine

After having some memory setting issues and the bios failing to init I reset the bios via the onboard switch.
Everything reintialized perfectly. I shut the box down reinstalled a network card. Here's where things get spookey.
I had a drive stick in the USB port with bios upgrades on it. I powered up the box and the drive stick proceeded to
boot to the bios upgrade application and try to download the same bios file I had already installed. The result was
a dead motherboard, due to a corrupt bios chip. All efforts to bring the Bios back were negative (including calling tech support for help) I've been working with the Striker Extreme for over a year with no problems. I am thoroughly BS.

(Yes Virginia the box has gone back to the vendor)

My question is how in the hell does a boot take place on a drive with no boot file on it, log into a file without being given the file name and run a bios file that is purposely renamed so the Bios upgrade program can't read the bios.bin. This is exactly the way it happened, no I didn't do this or I did that mistakenly. Gremlins???? I hope someone has some kind of answer other than stupidity.