Well you keep on doing that pratice, i know far tomuch about CRT
theory..
i service irradiation units designed to cross link polymores which
are nothing but huge CRT's with a titanium window and steel cone scan
section.
and one of the golden rules is not to apply Voltage (which reaches in
the 1.5 M range) unless the hot cathode is connected to the path.

i know your not working with irradition units but the theory of
operation is the exact same thing, just in a much larger scale.



You're comparing apples to oranges, 1.5M? We're talking 15-35 KV here, the
pins on the neck are connected to transistors rated at 250-300V. Comparing a
TV CRT to an irradiation unit is like comparing a hand crank dynamo to a 350
megawatt turbine, the basic principal may be similar but in practice the
difference is night and day.

If you ever have a chance, flip through the factory service manual for any
projection TV they'll almost always tell you to remove the neck boards
before powering up a set with deflection problems, forget to do it while
you've got the protection circuit disabled for testing and you've just
burned up $900 worth of tubes before you realize what happened.