The same 99% CPU, fans full-speed problem occurs on my Dell Inspiron 6400 running Dapper with all updates.
I have noticed that the problem is much worse during cold weather. On winter morning, the room temperature was below 5C, and the problem would happen every time it started. If I turned turned the machine off as soon as possible, then back on, it would still run at 99% CPU. If I left the thing running for a few minutes before rebooting the problem would go away and everything would start normally: I assume that things had warmed up internally. Now that it is spring in the southern hemisphere, the system usually starts up reliably except on very cold mornings, and the same trick works. Perhaps there is something wrong with the temperature detection (it interprets the very cold temperature as very hot), though I have no idea how that might make ipw3945 run at full-tick. One other point is that the fans turn on very early on in the boot process---after grub, after the splash screen appears, but before the first line of text. Stephen -- ipw3945 produces 99% cpu, making my laptop unusable https://launchpad.net/bugs/48395 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs