At least, that's one theory offered up by Fiorina in an interview Monday with the San Jose Mercury News.

In early 2005, Fiorina had quizzed the board about media leaks and had asked the Palo Alto, Calif., computer and printer company's outside counsel to do an investigation. It was inconclusive. When she was fired in February 2005, she was gearing up to solve the problem of the leaks, which she says are a symptom of a dysfunctional boardroom.

"I think some people were uncomfortable that I was going to do it," she said of her intention to examine the board. "We would have done the heavy lifting to answer the question - `Do we have qualified board members?'" said Fiorina in an interview in New York to promote her new book "Tough Choices." (Portfolio/Penguin Group, $24.95, 319 pp.)

Fiorina's book, which appeared in bookstores Monday, benefits from good timing. Many in the cast of characters who orchestrated her abrupt firing are themselves recently off the board, in the fallout from a boardroom scandal that has engulfed the company since early September and has made HP front page news.

The recent scandal has shocked Fiorina. She considers leaks a symptom of a greater problem - boardroom dissent not handled openly and people working their own agendas not considering the overall good of the company. To pursue the leaker, as much as HP's investigators did, though, was a mistake, Fiorina said.

"It seems to me there was a breakdown in judgment, in ethics, and in some cases common sense," she says. "No one said, `Gee we are going overboard on the symptom rather than the disease.'"

After she left the company, Fiorina herself was the subject of one of the most recent HP investigations as a possible person leaking to the press. Her telephone records were allegedly fraudulently accessed.

"My initial reaction was to be outraged," said Fiorina. "Now, I think it's sad because this whole thing spun out of control and no one raised their hand and said: `What are we doing?'"

The recent scandal has resulted in the resignation of three directors and some staff members, a congressional hearing and felony charges against five individuals. The company's chief executive Mark Hurd has struggled to move HP beyond the scandal but Fiorina's book sheds new light on how the technology company's board has functioned amid acrimony and distrust in recent years.

The current board's difficulties give her no pleasure, she said, although it may make her tale of falling victim to a dysfunctional board more believable.

Fiorina rode into HP as a person who would remake HP from a slow, lumbering technology company to become a limber, global leader. She chronicles how she tried to walk the line of both pushing the company to change and honoring the company's past and its values, dubbed the "HP Way" after a book by David Packard, one of the company's co-founders.

She met resistance along the way. In 2001, Walter Hewlett, a board member who rarely spoke at board meetings, decided to vote his shares against the company's intended merger with Compaq Computer. What resulted was a tumultuous shareholder battle, which Fiorina and HP ultimately won.

But merging the two companies proved difficult. And HP faltered in the months leading up to Fiorina's dismissal.

There was something personal about the firing, said Fiorina. If she was on probation, she wasn't told, Fiorina says. She bent to board demands but was shocked when confidential proposals discussed in the boardroom were leaked to media. She was dismissed without a thank you or a chance to say goodbye to HP staff.

Fiorina peppers her book with questions. Could it have been that she was going to revamp the board? Could it have been that board members now resented her tough persona that helped the company go through the shareholder battle? Was it her gender? Was her firing, perhaps, part sacrifice, to help heal the company after the Compaq merger and reunite the old guard and the founding families who had adamantly opposed the merger? "My firing had apparently settled a score," she writes.

Now, Mark Hurd, Fiorina's successor, receives plaudits for turning around the company since arriving in April 2005. Fiorina demurs.

"A company the size of Hewlett-Packard does not turn around in 12 months or 18 months," says Fiorina. "It's not about me versus Mark. It's not about who gets more credit. But I should get my fair share."

Fiorina wrestles with whether what happened to her also has something to do with being a woman in a predominantly male business environment. "Women are caricatured and stereotyped differently than men," she said. "The adjectives ascribed to women are different than men."

Fiorina offers no quick medicine for what it would take to remedy HP's current scandal, which she says "cuts to the core of how people think about the company."

Fiorina would not reveal any future plans, although she allowed that she could end up in corporate America or the public sector. "We'll see. I think I'll know it when I see it."