Well,it's narrowed down to that dodgy servo pcb now Greg.Apart from the two notorious griplets,there are numerous wire link's between tracks,and more links between the two sides of the board where component wires go through too!

If it's an intermittent connection somewhere,I would expect that flexing the board or gently tugging on the loom wires at the plug in connections,would throw up some indication?

The loom connectors can act up,but it's where the wire connects into the plug,rather that the connector itself.Again though,you should be able to "provoke it" if this is the culprit,by waggling the loom to see if the fault state alters..

I did have one odd problem that turned out to be due to oxidation of the connections for the servo upc,which of course controls the board.6201(servo upc) sit's in a raised socket,and in my case,it had been secured with blob's of glue.On investigation,both the pins of the chip and the socket connectors were quite black with oxidation.I had to replace the socket,but the chip pins cleaned up ok.

Might be worth checking that out too?

I don't remember having to replace any other componets on this pcb except of course the caps!

Nick

I haven't really found that it is intermittent in the sense that it will sometimes play a cd with the defective board. Only that sometimes it plays for a few seconds and the "?" on the display and sometimes it just spins and spins, but still never tracks a cd.  As soon as I plug the working board in there it works every time.  I checked and cleaned the IC pins and sockets and even swapped IC's from the working board.  No luck. So, I may just have to wait for the power supply regulators to arrive so I can have both machines side by side to make comparisons with.... Or I might just get frustrated and throw it off the bench!!! LOL! I am glad I got my customer's unit working at least!

Thanks again for your help!

Greg