During the "turning everything off and turning one process back on at a time" process in order to discover what exactly was causing my laptop to hang, I disabled the HAL daemon. When I spotted the ACPI issue, I tweaked my grub.conf and forgot all about it. Yesterday, I noticed some GNOME apps were looking for HAL so I enabled it again. When I booted my laptop this morning, it just went "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that". Not sure why I need it or what the bug is but it's off again.
In other news, I've discovered Eclipse ( + EPIC ) since every other code editor seems to suck!
