MacBook running hot, Dashbard broken, short Battery Life

[Navi1101]

Hey, everybody. My MacBook is having three little issues that I think might be related.

First off, none of the widgets on my Dashboard are working. I can open and close them okay, but when I try to us one - or click on one at all - nothing happens. The Widgets I was using when this started include:

• I Can Has Cheezburger feed
• Stickies
• Pong Clock
• Weather Channel feed
• Chrysalis-B
• Chi Pet
• iCal
• Calculator

Secondly, for some reason my MacBook's fans won't stop running. They start up within a few minutes after I wake it up (I rarely reboot and usually just leave it suspended, but it does this immediately after reboot too) and just keep going. I'm usually working on a desk or table, and nothing is obstructing the vents. I've even tried cleaning the vents out with a air duster, but it didn't help at all.

Thirdly, probably because the fans are always going, I only have about two hours of battery life, instead of the customary five. This change happened suddenly, just like the fans and the broken Dashboard. The Book isn't old enough to have the battery's ability to hold a charge depleted this much naturally, unless there's a serious issue that I didn't know about...

I've only has this Book since about June; it's the little white not-Pro version with an Intel Core2Duo, 2GB of RAM, and plenty of hard drive space left. I suspect there might be a program running in the background that's sapping everything, but I didn't download anything interesting when this started, and when I try cmd+alt+esc there's nothing visible to force-quit besides things I know I'm running at the moment (Firefox, NeoOffice, etc).

Thoughts? Ideas? Halp?

[DeltaMac]

Applications/Utilities, open Activity Monitor. Choose All Processes from the drop-down menu.
Click the % CPU header to sort the list by CPU usage.

That will show you the 'other' processes that are running, and you will see that there are processes running in the background that you may need help in identifying.
You should be able to quickly tell which processes are causing your processor to run so hard.

Come back here for answers about specific processes.

[Navi1101]

Yikes! Thanks Delta; it turns out my Dashboard process was taking up about 96% of my CPU in addition to being crashed. I force-quit it and the fans have become blissfully silent, and my battery life just shot up to 4:48. ^^ One of the widgets is still stuck, but I'm hoping that'll be something an eventual reboot can fix.

Thanks for your help!