Whenever I come back from suspend, the fan spins at full speed for about 2 minutes before it clams down. It will do this regardless of load on the cpu. And the laptop just came back from a (potentially long) suspend so it isn't hot. At all.
After two minutes or so, the fan goes back to normal and then responds to load as you would expect.
How can I get it to not do this?
Edit: This is on an hp pavilion dv6000
There is properly only one way... cut the wire feeding power to the fan.
It is not Ubuntu who starts that fan but your BIOS/Mainboard, you may be able to do some tweaking in your BIOS but i doubt it will work for the out of suspend time.
The original answer is not satisfactory.
More particularly, you may be able to use pwmconfig from the fancontrol package to have more fine-grained control over your fans. Success does vary, though. Try at your own risk -- if you do something wrong you can potentially halt your CPU fan.