Wierd Gpu Temperature Change

Hey, so the other day i noticed the back of my pc was hotter than normal and to my surprise the gpu (HD 5850) is at 40c just idling. regualry its much lower, around 25-26C. I recently updated the driver to 10.8 but i dont know if thats the reason, i switched back to 10.7 and still nothing. my case temps are fine, around 28c idle but the gpu is scaring me because it has gotten to 50-52C idle on 21 fan speed and i dont even have a browser running in the background. i have triple checked for background processes and nothing is there. i have to turn my fan speed to about 30% now to keep it to 40C which makes no sense. when im gaming
my card used to never get past 50 even under full load. can anyone help me out here?
i havent changed my environment settings and i dust out regularly as well
:/
i happened to have a screenshot from before that showed my temps:
and these are my temps now:

also, when im gaming this is where my temps hover around
default fan speed :63C
30% fan speed :51C
40% fan speed 45C
please help?

yeah, i know :) but still i just find it wierd that it would change so drastically by no means. i hope this wont keep happening :/

Your getting high idle temps because of the idiots who make ati drivers thought it would be a good idea to have really high idle clocks if you overclock

look at your current values clockspeed
and then set to default setting and see you clock speed

my original driver i think was either 10.7 or 10.6. i do not overclock my card in the clock speeds only the fan speeds.
by setting my card to defualt factory settings it constantly changes between 157/300 400/900 and sometimes 765/1125.
and the temps are around 50-52C on absolutely no activity with almost every background process turned off. so this could be a driver problem?

I might be out of context here, but when I had a similar problem with my cpu I found out that dust particles had accumulated on the fan blades (and heatsink) and thus reducing its effectiveness...we have a bunny roaming the house (a breed with very fine fur that sheds about every 3 month) but cats are also known to cause clogged fans and ultimately cpu "heat strokes" as well.
Granted with ~90F (~30C) outside it's kind of hard to get back your former 28C
-DG

If there is such a big difference just go back to v10.4 or whatever worked for you.
(Doesn't ATI provide a tool to crank up the fan speed?)

-DG