Dock11 Fan Problems

[BOHICA]

After a little over a year of ownership, the fan in my DockII (with a T42 docked) is making much more noise than it did initially.

My first thought was to disassemble the unit to clean the fan myself, but I'm rather surprised at the ackward placement of the screws and am afraid I'll just do further damage. I've frankly never seen a computer device so weirdly engineered...

Are there any board secrets concerning how to deal with a sudden increase in the DockIIfan noise? Anybody have luck sending their DockIIs back to either IBM or Lenovo for repair?