A8N-SLI Lockups

I have a system built on the A8N-SLI Deluxe, with an AMD 64 +3500 cpu.
Graphics is an nVidia GeForce 6800 (BFG OC version)

The system is about 2 years old, and up untill the day before yesterday
has been flawless.

The box is dual boot (with 2 120gb sata harddrives), with WinXP Pro, and
Linux.

The problems started with some odd behaviours in WinXP. My drivers started
going to crap. At one point, when opening the device manager, there were
no devices showing at all. With some work, I got the device drivers
re-installed, but it was never quite stable again.
Then, it started randomly blanking the screen for a moment, and then
things would be fine for a while.
Now, Windows won't run at all. It will boot, but when I log in, explorer
crashes first, then DrWatson dies. After that, it just sits there. Nothing
works.

If I boot it in Linux (Suse 10), it seems to run fine for a while, and
then, at no particular interval, it just locks up. The only way to get it
back is to hit the power button.

I would have suspected that XP had just crapped out, except that Linux is
also mi-behaving on the same box.

One symptom may have been that it overheated, but I have no way to verify
that.
When I opened the box, the intake screen was solidly plugged with dust
(guess I need to pay more attention to THAT! I moved a few months ago, it
wasn't a problem at the last location... seems it is now!). So, I cleaned
that up, and then noticed that the fins for the cpu cooler were also
blocked with dust. I cleaned that out as well.

So, I suspect that the box has been running hot for a while, but again, I
don't have the monitoring tools installed (they don't work in Linux
anyway, and XP no longer runs...), so I can't verify that.

I'm really looking for some reasons for the XP failure, and now the Linux
instability. If the mobo is cooked, I'll replace it, but I'd like to have
a better idea, and some advice on where/how to look to figure out what's
going on.

HELP?!?!?

NOTE: I'm sending this from the crippled box. It will run for a while in
Linux. But the lockups are random. Could be minutes, could be hours...

Thanks in advance!


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