I would go with what ejohnson1144 said about a bad thermostat.
The round silver thing is a capacitor, if it is hot then it has an internal short. Given enough time it will start leaking at the cross etched on the top, sometimes they will explode with a bang like a gunshot.
Several years ago there was batch of capacitors that had the formula of the paste inside messed up and installed in desktop computers. I happened to have had one of those motherboards, 5 capacitors leaked, 1 exploded loud enough the next door neighbor heard it.