Who are HighWinds Network Group and why are they tipping gigs of data into my PC whenever I

This is weird and it makes me angry even as I know many of you who bother to read this will think I'm a paranoid old bugger.

The backstory. I have PoE installed on 2 PC's one that I use to regularly game on and another that used to be my main gaming PC which I use when I want to trade while playing or chiefly when a friend comes out to see me and we want to game. The old box is still OK for basics it has a 2500k cpu and an NV 780 card

When I built my latest machine back in March I shifted my Steam library en masse so apart from a couple of old rpg's I haven't bothered to shift cos I nevver play em PoE is the only game on it. I keep it up to date but the other day when one of the kids was streaming something or other he complained about the poor speed on Netflix asking me what I was doing. I was playing PoE which is never normally a prob but I had kicked up PoE on the other box to get it up to date for my mate coming over this weekend. It had patched hours before but I hadn't got around to turning it off. When I checked on Network is was still chugging down a steady 300 KBytes (n not bits)/sec hours after the patch had finished and the PoE was running not logged in. I turned off a heap of stuff ran AV etc but the downloading only stopped when I turned off poE.
I checked out the other RPG's on the box to see if they too would cause the mystery connection. They didn't so I turned off PoE on the backup and got back to the game and the kid stopped whining - about that anyway.

Tonight before I turned on PoE on the spare box I kicked up wireshark all the while hoping the incident didn't repeat. It did though and my system is downloading mystery data from IP4 69.16.175.10 as long as PoE is on for hours after the latest patches have been got and without being actually logged in to poE.
If I turn off PoE the D/L stops only to start again as soon as I start the game up.
Why is this? The IP is registered to High Winds Network Group in Texas and they claim to be 'gaming content providers.

I installed PoE as a standalone nothing to do with Steam Origin Ubisoft or GOG all of whose games were shifted onto my new box.

I trust that GGG don't have some deal with High Winds that allows other games distributors to use their connection as a way of servicing other content - do they?

What is going on? GGG do you have any idea how/why this is happening because the download is still going full tilt at 1 MByte data every 4 seconds hours after your patch was downloaded and installed. Not a lot? Well you try and keep a family going on adsl cos the providers who have been paid to roll out fiber only deliver excuses. But even if I had a much fatter pipe I would still want to know what is going on here.
According to wireshark this tcp data is part of a larger chunk of data (TCP segment of a reassembled PDU) but it isn't giving me much beyond that to tell me exactly wtf these gigs are for & where they are going.

Digital distribution is convenient but not when it operates outside the users wishes and needs.

So after no response from GGG I ran pack check which came back OK. The main game directory was full of folders named with Chinese characters (although there was less than 80k of unreadable crap in em) so I ripped them out but 'a corrupt name in the application path' error occurred every time I tried to uninstall the game itself. I manually deleted game files and then cleared out the registry prior to downloading and reinstalling Path of Exile. Now when I start the game up Exactly the same thing still happens!
This Highwinds site continues to throw garbage my way from Texas whenever the Path of Exile exe process is running. What is going on GGG?
I shifted the games directory in the vain hope that would make it less likely for a repetition.

Does GGG have any relationship with Highwinds? If so what is going on? I can't firewall the exe cause the game won't work so what next?
And yes I run avira which is up to date and has scanned the system and found nothing.

Have you tried blocking the IP through windows firewall?

Highwinds is a CDN provider. Google em and you can find out a bit about them. If you haven't gotten a response here, email support.

I notice that highwinds also supply content for valve and the only scenario that makes sense is that after I pulled out the steam content and uninstalled the steam client for some reason highwinds is trying to 'repair' my system. I patched PoE on my gaming lappy last night and we will use that with its shortcomings, when my friend arrives, but long term I would like to get to the bottom of this.
Blocking the IP via the firewall will likely just stop PoE from working altogether.
I first noticed the issue after last weeks patch not yesterday's one but since I barely pay attention to that box it could have been doing this for a while.

I'm not hair tearingly worried as the traffic is all one way and avira hasn't uncovered any malware but I really don't need the wasted bandwidth either.
Maybe I'll run it for a few hours tonight to see if the mysterious download ever does complete.

I really don't want to do the next logical step of cleaning out the ssd and reinstalling windows as I do use that box for emailing and stuff since I decided to keep my gaming box for gaming only.
There's always a few things that get lost - bookmarks scrapbook entries or email addy's a clean install invariably means that sometime in future I will be unable to access/contact something but hey that's tech