Like many other owners of a Macbook Pro laptop, I have also been struggling for a while with excessive heat issues on mine (a mid-2010 15" i5); not only was the laptop usually so hot that I almost couldn't touch it, but its performance was also badly affected due to the CPU throttling that the OS operates so to prevent damage from heat. Eventually, I decided to reapply the thermal paste to both the CPU and the GPU, with amazing results.