The first bad sign was obviously the smell of burning plastic. However the frozen fan blades, and melted manufactures sticker were a good indication that something was really wrong.
	It was not until we had the fan off of the heatsink that we realized this was more than a regular failure. In this instance the fan had not seized-up and then become overheated because it was unable to appropriately cool the heatsink, but rather had electrically shorted out. This had the potential to cause a fire, or at the very least kill the processor. It also left a rather funky burnt smell in my computer.
	Since the fan was already toasted, we ripped it apart further to find the cause of the problem. Looking at the motor it is quite obvious that one of the semiconductors (not sure if its an IC or transistor) overheated and basically burned through the surrounding PCB. This then caused the sleeve bearing to seize up (or vise-versa) and the fan to stop rotating - assuming power was even going to it at this point :-)
	The fans' frame shows the damage done by the overheating component. The plastic is not simply melted bu visibly burned. Just what every CPU needs - a raging fire on top!
	The fan blades used a sleeve bearing. No signs of the reported ball bearing were found, this despite the documentation stating a "1 ball / 1 sleeve" configuration. Sadly this is quite typical of many lesser-known fans, where either the specs are misunderstood by the VAR, or the fan manufacturer substitutes one variety for another to fill out an order.

We'll be contacting the folks who gave us the Thermal Buster to test out about this little failure. Just to clarify though, the Thermal Buster heatsink itself still looks like a very promising cooler and is designed to handle 1Ghz Intel, and 1.1Ghz AMD chips. We should have the review completed shortly - just as soon as we locate another 50mm fan that is :-)