Good evening Nigel,
Yes, here in Oregon, near the capitol - Salem, currently awash in rain. (I suppose you are too~!~) I do understand your thoughts on the caps and I agree. I recently acquired off EBay a "Working" (wink, wink, wink), Tektronix 2465A along with a Tek 7L13 module for another project, (vintage gear) and both had bad Tantalums and Electrolytic in the power supplies. I suspect there are defective caps here in the VCR too. It just hardly seems worth putting any time into this but it's family... the worse sort of repair. Normally I like to know what has failed (and why) but in this case I may just shotgun all the relative caps. It's always much more difficult without any sort of literature so unless I hear some interesting leads in the forum, I'm just going to go ahead and R&R the caps. None seem inflated but I'm sure high ESR is the culprit. If that doesn't cure it, it may be the control IC or the switching transistor. You think there may be something in the secondary? I can't hear or see the oscillator even trying to start, which led me to think the control circuit is preventing it from starting rather than starting and seeing an overload and shutting down. I was just hoping someone had the key in their pocket for this little pain in my rear. Thanks for the reply too~!~ I know I'm a noob here and I'm sure there are all sorts of newcomers showing up asking for help.
Regards,
~Michael - AF7U