It could be a coincidence. But it's suspicious enough to advise caution. We know what the bug is, and we have a very nice workaround queued up now. There's no reason to test any more of these specific systems to destruction :).Did you try to disconnect all power resources (e.g. AC adapter and all batteries and wait for some time)?
I did try re-installing off the vendor DVD and it was still broken. I fear I bought it from the wrong place to get sympathetic _frontline_ support / warrantee. I'm not interested in RMA back to Asus - too much work and downtime for a cheap system, when I have an easy workaround. I haven't noticed any problems with "noapic".
The symptoms strongly suggest overflow in an event buffer or counter maintained by the Embedded Controller. So the EC firmware may have a bug, of the sort that results in "unspecified behaviour". A bug in a special purpose (read: not subject to wide testing) subsystem which has direct connections to things like frequency and voltage control.
Hopefully I'm wrong, and I don't really know what I'm talking about here.
Regards
Alan