as far as that being only dust, I wish it were the case, but no.. That is some of the inside goo from the capacitor.. Granted, it wasn't any explosion as it is only on the top, but they are blown in the way that they would all need to be replaced. Actually, after messing with it a bit more, I found a few more as well. The only bad part, is I think something may have occurred to my hard drive.. Tried to put it into another machine, by the time I got it to recognize, I did a ls and all I got were a bunch of ???'s... sooo... I guess I shall find out how bad things are once I get the replacement motherboard in..
although, I must say that your story there is definatley a massive failure
something I would like to witness, but only when I am on just the witness end of things and not the victim *grin*. I have caught a ceased CPU fan on a couple of occassions, but I found them through either a) odd sounds coming from case (fan was hitting the heatsink and slowing down drastically), or b) dumb luck.
I would have loved to see your face when you opened up that case to find random parts loose inside *grin*