Kernel 2.6.18-4 and acpi

[John Marks <jmarks1@nycap.rr.com>]

Hello everyone,

I made the mistake of doing a dist-upgrade today.  Kernel 2.6.18-4-k7 
was "upgraded".  Now the system load is unusally high and things run slow.

Another thing that happened was I began to get an error message from acpi 
stating "unable to turn cooling device on."  That can be cured by removing 
the thermal module.  I have also tried booting with acpi=off, but that seems 
to make a big mess of the IRQ's and basically nothing works.

The system uses Soyo KT333 Dragon Plus and the processor is AMD Athlon XP 
2000.

Does anyone have any advice?