I'm not an expert on coolbook since I don't have a MBA, but I think people were suggesting that coolbook may have been the cause of the problems, not the solution to them.
NC Macguy asked if you had coolbook installed because if you did it might have been responsible for the kernal panics. From what I've read coolbook allows you to control the voltage of the processors. You can apparently run the processors at slightly less voltage then apple chooses to out of the box which lets them run cooler at the expense of stability. If you were to undervolt them too far Kernal panics would be the result. Since you didn't have it installed something else is at fault, and you certainly don't need to install coolbook.
That said, I'm not sure what to suggest doing. If this were happening to me I'd probably go w/ the clean install route... it's probably overkill, but for me at least, the time spent reinstalling everything would be less then the time spent searching for a solution. That's just my opinion though, and I'm sure others will disagree, so take it with a grain of salt.
