Thank you for all advice given so far. Her machine's still being repaired. Mine, of course, has refused to misbehave since my posting. My home office has cooled off quite a bit, too.
When her machine returns and we hope proves reliable, I'll take mine in to have the CPU heatsink re-applied. (The chip does appear to have streaks of dried wax on it, and I'm not inclined to do any more fumbling about with it myself.) Next question, though: I've found xmbmon to keep track of CPU temperature, but it has to be run by root in a terminal window which is a bit of a nuisance. Ubuntu Universe offers lm_sensors and I've installed this via Synaptic, but can't get it to work. It seems that I need a kernel driver "i2c-sis645.o" for my SiS 648 chipset - based motherboard. I've got a file i2c-sis645.c tucked away in a directory of my old RedHat 7.3/kernel 2.4.20 partition. But I assume that'd have to be compiled (how?) and inserted into the kernel (?modprobe). Google is not being my friend on this issue. Any advice? Meanwhile, how might I run xmbmon from the panel? If I try running it as myself (not as root) I get "seteuid: Operation not permitted". I can't find a "seteuid" command and "man seteuid" and "apropos seteuid" yield nothing. =====Andrew
