Grin.. yeah the beauty and curse of a diode laser. Believe me I know all about this. (A bit ago I spent ~1 week measuring the 25C free running wavelength of 100's of DL's into a wave meter Jr. Whose back reflections is bad too. The back reflection "stair case" has lots of steps in ~1GHz, so ~100MHz. for a ~1m path length. Watching a spectrum seems like a good indicator.
Are back reflections a parametric amplification? So that below some threshold it's "mostly harmless"?
This is much smaller... it smells like a ground loop, shielding thing, which is harder, cause whatever I did ~10 years ago for grounding and shielding was f'ing around till it worked...
George H.