I exorcised the demons from my laptop over the Thanksgiving break. Turns out that running an Athlon 64 at 2.0GHz with 3+ years of dust collection is a bad idea. I had been forced to run everything with the power savings set to maximum (which under-clocks my CPU to 800MHz). Running anything CPU intensive would ultimately lead to programs crashing as the poor CPU attempted not to DIAF.
Tags: athlon 64, dust, laptop, maintenance, overheating