[Podboy]

It would however be valuable to know how the heck that much power got in there! Because what it might mean is that there's some component on there, whether that's a capacitor or something, that really should be refreshed/replaced before this happens to other cards of the same design.  Obviously this is a design flaw, most of the time you would engineer multiple safeguards to blow out as fusible links that would keep this much power from getting to an internal low-voltage communication line. So that sets a precedent that doesn't sound very appealing for long-term collectors.

Thanks for the run-down weblacky. You reinforced a lot of what I was suspecting. A tempting, simple cap replacement project just became a very large "I definitely don't have time for this right now" rabbit hole.

Follow up question: What will it take to convince someone here, smarter and more qualified than me, to take it off my hands for the cost of shipping? Hopefully, of course, with the admirable, educational goal of finding out WTF happened and how we may avoid it in the future.