Ok, so I decided to clean the board & re-seat the chips. I'd say about 1/3rd of the chips were real grimy, so after labeling location and oreintation:
http://instagram.com/p/rMsDLGAjkx, I hit em with some contact cleaner and steel brushed em (carefully of course).
From:
http://instagram.com/p/rNK6eEAju3 to
http://instagram.com/p/rNK5QyAju2. Gave it a Simple Green bath for a few hours & when I pulled em out gave em a hose off and then spent about 30 minutes per board with an air compressor (first with a broad blower & then a precise head going over every connection thoroughly).
Then re-seated all the chips, while making sure all the legs are making proper contact. Real damn satisfying by the way - pushing those bastards back in nice and snug.
I gotta admit - at this point I was feeling pretty good about the prospect of my problems being potentially fixed & just looking at my now pristine looking 1981 Galaga board was giving me that private sense of hobby pride (which I only write here as I know anyone reading this gets it).
I then went on about my day satisfied and somewhat confident until about 6 hours later when I plugged everything back up and fired it on.
I heard the monitor's degauss going - but after about 20 seconds no picture.. I went around back to take a look and there was a little bit of smoke coming from the Molex connecting my PCB to my monitor chassis...
I turned everything off immediately and unplugged all power connecting to the PCB/Video board.
It seems there was probably somehow still some trace of water/simple green somehow in some crevice, right?
My question to you all is how bad is it at this point? Am I totally F'ed?
-Discouraged/Deflated in New Orleans