:smileyembarrassed: Well, the AC power utility only prevents the dock from charging. It doesn't prevent the tablet from charging off the base. So basically that is an even worse situation. The base battery still drains. In eight hours it lost another 6%. I'm off to disable that again.
Since we haven't heard from HP and there is no bios setting like USB charge has, my guess it is hardware logic that is not programmable. I may ebay out this thing while it is a new machine and cut my loss. Basically the machine has a half life of ten days when shut down and about four in standby. I haven't done any tests on standby since I disabled USB charge so I might try that.