Well, I was convinced it couldn't be the fan because I could see the fan
spinning on the bottom of the computer and it looked pretty clean, but I
decided I had to take the thing apart anyway. There was some dust buildup
but nothing that would have choked the fan off. There were however 2 fans,
one of which wasn't working. I took the heat sink/fan assy off and cleaned
it out, and while I was at it, I stuck a thin copper shim between the heat
sink and cpu. I tried this on a hp dv9000 after reflowing the solder on the
video chip with a cheap heat gun and a cheaper infrared thermometer and it
has worked great. While putting the thing back together, I wriggled the
power connections from the fans to the main board and lo and behold, the
second fan started blowing. Still running Debian Squeeze but, I'm going to
try getting Ubuntu or Xubuntu 10.04 going in the morning. Now I just have
to figure out what to do with these extra screws...