As Gabriel Heatter * was wont to say... "There's good news tonight!" Or more
precisely, 10AM PST.

I started by replacing the four electrolytic PS caps that had leaked. (The
unit still worked, though I don't know why. I'll take them into work Monday
and see exactly what sort of condition they're in.) Oddly, the new Nichicon
caps have a brown sleeve that exactly matches the color of the leak. Which I
couldn't clean up, because neither water nor isopropyl alcohol would
dissolve it.

With great trepidation and hands trembling **, I soldered in a Littelfuse
1.5A picofuse to replace the blown IC protector (ICP-N38).

Bingo! She works.

Although the PS caps _had_ to be replaced, they were not the problem. As
replacing the ICP was the only thing needed to fix the problem, it follows
that an ICP _can_ be intermittent (until my messing around two weeks ago
blew it).

Something similar occurred 25 years ago, when RF got into my Lux power amp
and blew the triple-diffused RF output transistors. They were blown _just
enough_ to pull sufficient current from the power line to grossly overheat
the unit (it took over an hour for the power transformer to cool down!), but
not enough to blow the line fuses!

There's great pleasure in fixing something valuable, a product the
manufacturer wanted $65 (plus shipping to) just to look at. *** And I
wouldn't have been able to do it if I hadn't bought the service manual 20
years ago.

I also have an XP-A1010 (the same model with a titanium rather than black
finish), which was available to replace the XP-A1000 when it konked out. I
bought enough spare parts to service the XP-A1010 -- including a
lithium-cell holder -- but whether I dig into it in the near future is an
unknown. Perhaps I'll just lift the lid and look for leaky things.

Thanks, as always, for the (mostly) useful advice and support from this
group.


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Heatter

** Not to be confused with Hans Trembling, the famous German
something-or-another.

*** I should be grateful that JVC still has the XP-A1000 on their
"repairable" list.