re: taping off the speaker of an existing phone. that'd require a phone to actually be in a useful place and not be moved.... they drag the phones all over the office right now.
re: shorting the data pair and wiring directly to the voice amp. that actually sounds like the simplest solution, provided I can figure out the mess of wires in this closet.
re: adding a piou and using hyperterminal. will the beastie find the piou automatically on powerup? don't I still have to enter programming mode on the phone and tell it what type of card is in that slot? I forget now if it found it automatically or not when I did this on my box...
re: needing pctu3 or 4 to do digital phones. bummer. it's got a pctu2 in it, so I'll add a 3 or 4 to the list of "would be nice, but not required" things.

the system is such a tangle, I'll likely need to stick a piou into it just to see all the programming... i don't wanna look at it 2 lines/20 characters at a time.

thanks guys, ya'll are great!