On Tue, 08 Mar 2016 12:33:50 -0500, legg wrote:

Waste of breath.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking - your suggestion still hasn't been
adopted. I've been giving it more thought and I've come up with a
brainwave.

This is a 2W resistor. If it's trying to dissipate more than 2W as I
strongly believe, something's definitely wrong. The problem up until now
has been measuring the dissipation, because we can't use I^2*R or
variations thereof because of the highly noisy/irregular waveform. So...
Here's the clever bit:
Measure exactly how long it takes at present for the resistor to reach
say 50'C. I believe it's around 1 minute, but get the exact time. Then
let it cool completely back to the room ambient temperature. Remove from
circuit. Attach to bench power supply and by means of trial and error,
set the voltage across the resistor to raise it's temperature to 50'C in
1 minute (will obviously require several attempts, but no matter). Read
off the voltage level which produces this outcome, then just do V^2/R to
find W and see if it exceeds 2W.
I'll do it first thing tomorrow!