Speaking of GUI weirdness, I've seen a couple of relatively newer macbooks do this thing where the laptop is shutdown with wifi disabled, but after login on startup the wifi icon displays the wifi scanning mode as if the wifi is enabled and looking for networks before reverting to the wifi disabled display icon.

Is this a GUI bug or is the wifi disabled setting overrided for a split second on startup? I haven't looked into it, but the latter would be extremely concerning.