On Feb. 20, an e-mail popped in my editor-in-chief's inbox from Randall Kennedy, a tech blogger for InfoWorld, with a somewhat ominous opening sentence: "It is my understanding that eWEEK is currently conducting an investigation of the company I founded, Devil Mountain Software, Inc., and both myself and the individual known as 'Craig Barth.'"

"Craig Barth" was CTO of a company called Devil Mountain Software, the Website of which bills its "research and engineering staff" as generators of the "most accurate, authoritative data on Microsoft Windows performance metrics, market share trends and composition." As it turns out, "Craig Barth" and Randall Kennedy are one and the same, sort of like Verbal Kint and Keyser Soze in "The Usual Suspects," only hopefully with fewer exploding ships and less gunfire and tough-guy dialogue.

On Feb. 21, Larry Dignan over at ZDnet published a long story detailing the Craig Barth-Randall Kennedy connection. Kicking off with a cheerful, "Buckle in, because this tale goes from zero to X-files in a few minutes," that article cites InfoWorld quoting extensively from Kennedy/Barth; check it out here. InfoWorld announced in a Feb. 21 blog post that it had given Kennedy the boot for "misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software ... in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics."

The InfoWorld post continues: "Kennedy has stated that this fabrication was a misguided effort to separate himself (or more accurately, his InfoWorld blogger persona) from his Devil Mountain Software business."

In a short note pasted atop a Feb. 17 article about Windows 7-equipped PCs allegedly draining RAM faster than Hemingway at last call, ComputerWorld's Gregg Keizer--quoted by ZDnet as using Devil Mountain Software often as a source--suggests that he was duped. "Given that he disguised his identity to Computerworld and a number of other publications, the credibility of Kennedy's statements is called into question. Rather than simply remove stories in which he is quoted, we have left them online so readers can weigh his data and conclusions for themselves."

So I set up a call with Kennedy. Might as well hear everybody's side, no?

"I never lied about anything," Kennedy told me during that call on the morning of Feb. 22. However, he did admit to what he described as "riling up" certain groups in a quest for page views; something that paid off, he continued, when he became the site's "single biggest page-view draw."

The problem, Kennedy said, was one of keeping the worlds of entrepreneur and flamewar-instigating enterprise blogger apart; a conundrum that he settled by adopting the Craig Barth moniker for one of those worlds. He came across as defiant about the data produced by Devil Mountain Software, asserting that his analysis was legitimate.

Right before this situation broke open, Devil Mountain Software claimed that a substantial percentage of the 20,000 PCs it monitors were having slowdown issues supposedly related to Windows 7 consuming up to 95 percent of available RAM. Personally, I had never heard a Windows 7 user complain about such an issue (battery life is another story) but Kennedy insists that his data will stand up to third-party verification.

"I'm not trying to deceive anybody, or deceive about the data points; I'm just trying to separate myself from the morass that became my writing for InfoWorld," Kennedy said. "I didn't plagiarize something or steal something and then publish it in The New York Times. I stand for everything Craig ever said; I just used a pseudonym."

Kennedy also mentioned that he had spent the 1990s in consulting gigs for Intel, Microsoft and other major players, which in turn gave him some of the knowledge base necessary to launch his own company. I asked Microsoft whether Kennedy had ever done any consulting work for it during that decade, and if the company had any sort of official statement about the whole debacle. "I have no comment to share on this topic," a Microsoft spokesperson told me on Feb. 22. "Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause."

In an interview today with The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy insisted that InfoWorld had known about his pseudonym for a year and did nothing, while InfoWorld Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr said that simply "isn't true." Kennedy told me the same thing when I interviewed him, but I'm not going to step into the middle of a "he said/no, he said" debate. Nobody wins those.

Nobody's winning in this situation, either.