How so? Out of the problems I have seen with Shuttles, only one has been thermal.

Yeah, my SN45G is working fine (Athlon XP3200, Radeon 9800 Pro, Maxtor 250Gb HD), touch wood. It doesn't often run 100% CPU, except when playing games, and Half-Life 2 is still not out.

My other Shuttle box (SS51?, Celeron 1.3GHz) did die once, but that was a complete death -- and didn't appear to be thermal in nature (it was in a cooled 19" rack at the time). Having replaced the motherboard, it seems to be working fine now -- it's sitting here beside me running my website.