Hi again,
When my Sony CRT failed it was the main transistor for the high voltage section. Never checked the caps because it was only a year old.
As we've said all along, Sony don't fit crap quality capacitors, so they don't fail
LOPT transistor failures on Sony CRT sets were commonly caused by dry joints on the line driver transformer, which is something you resolder if you ever change the transistor - apart from that it was almost always the LOPTX arcing internally, which instantly blows the transistor again.
My procedure was as follows:
1) LOPT transistor found to be S/C
2) Examine driver transformer VERY carefully for dry joints with a magnifying glass.
3) If dry joints, resolder, replace transistor, and see if it works.
4) If no dry joints give customer a quote for replacing the LOPTX and transistor (and STILL resolder the transformer as well).
Notice that if there were no dry joints I didn't even bother removing the S/C transistor.
A further complication was that it often blew the main-micro (a large SM device) - funnily, despite using the exact same chassis, it depended greatly if it was a 4:3 set, or a 16:9 widescreen set - I can't remember which way round it was, but one type killed the micro probably 50% of the time, and the other probably only 5% - weird or what?