Another nasty caught, I'm posting it on the behalf of my friend...
So he had this VX S7 system (which he handed me... Can't complain, it still boots, but it is very iffy sometimes), he decided to tear it apart to give it a good clean, and this is where things went south, first of all, he stumbled on some kind of dead nopes bug carcasses ? No big deal yet...
But after trying to dust it, well, he uncovered some kind of foul-smelling dust (it had a very unusual smell, I cannot describe it) of course he blew it all over the room by mistake, cue in unbreathable atmosphere, sneezing and coughing like there is no tomorrow... It was utter chaos.
And I'd probably bet there was a good and hefty quantity inside (when I got the tower, I had also some of the powder fall right in my room but the vacuum cleaner took care of that...), I don't know what it was but sure it smelled really bad.
And in that tower, when I got to cleaning and lubricating the fan's bearings, there was a crap ton of this same dust inside, I bet it was some sort of extinguisher powder (I had a BC powder extinguisher leak one day, it smelled just like the same powder that I found inside of the tower).
Another one I caught this time from a chipset heatsink, a nice scar trying to put it back (you thought Socket 7 heatsinks were that bad to remove? There is worse, always worse than the absolute worst) it has since healed (that happened 3-5 years ago?) not to mention it was probably sharper than AT case edges ("Death by thousand cuts")
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]