It has been quite a while now since my last Xpander crash/garble incident and I am starting to believe (knock on wood) the problem is fixed. The last thing I did was remove and re-insert the CPU's (in anticipation of new CPU chips arriving in the mail, to see if I had the right tools for the job). I find it hard to believe that improved anything. However, while fidgeting with the CPU's I also noticed a half-loose ribbon connector on the far left connecting the voice board to the controller board. (See attached picture for the ribbon cable I am talking about.) I pushed the connector back in.

My best guess of what happened is now that when I did work on the transformer (which is all the way on the right in the chassis) this ribbon cable somehow got pulled loose, causing intermittent connection problems and hence crashes. It sounds vague but less so than 'pulling the CPUs out of their sockets and reinserting them fixed the problem'. It also paints me as a fool for creating the problem in the first place, but I would rather be the fool who unseated a connector than having to chase down a mystery component failure.

I hope this concludes this thread (again, knock on wood). :) Thanks for the help and encouragement Bob!

Cheers, Jacob