Finally got around to putting two of my operational units online. Both of these have hard drives, and the other operational one (out of four) recently got an SSD upgrade - so it has no music loaded yet. But onwards with this tale:

The first unit I bought was in use for a number of years in a warm environment. When I put it back online I began noticing lockups, restarts, other misbehavior. This prompted me to take the top off and begin playing swaptronics with the modules in the fourth unit I have, which itself has a bad EL backlight driver.

Power supply was OK. Next, I started looking at the motherboard. What I found were several questionable electrolytics. I swapped the motherboard from the bad display unit into the Central and booted it. The Central has been stable.

The new/good motherboard has Panasonic SMD electrolytics in these spots. I'm not sure of the manufacturer of the ones on the bad board but they all appear to have slightly swollen tops. Anyone remember the bad capacitor plague of the late 90s? These would have been in the supply chain about that time. It also appears that heat tends to accelerate the failure - so would explain what ultimately happened to mine.

When I get my SMT rework area set back up in the next few months I'm going to have a look at removing these from the motherboard and replacing them. Those whose Centrals have died for no reason might want to open them up and examine the motherboard. If you see several capacitors with scored tops that are beginning to bulge, it's likely yours has bad capacitors. (BIG industry problem. A former employer got bit pretty hard by that nonsense.)

Will update this thread with results when I rework the board. Feel free to add your own thoughts or experiences. I'd like to help keep this now-classic piece of equipment going.