T43 won't boot - if you know the MB really well, please help

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I have a T43 w/ X300 that when i got it had the following symptoms.

Pressing the Power button appeared to do nothing at all. No leds, no fans, no beeps nothing.
However, Inspecting the power on the MB, 16V, 5V, and 3.3V would be ok when the AC adapter
was pluged in but before pressing the power button. After pressing the button, 5 and 3.3V would
be gone and 16V was only present in the circuits near the power connector. Removing the battery and
PS would get me back to the first state.

After studying the board, i traced the issue to MAX1989 (multichannel remote/local temp
sensor IC) THis chip was shutting down the board. It has 4 sets of inputs, one of which
is connected to the GPU. Figuring that this was a case of a broken ball, i heated up the two vias
with a little extra flux and solder in hopes that the ball would reflow. This definitely changed things.

Now, pressing the power button will cause the CPU fan to spin briefly, the LEDs to blink, and the 5V and
3.3V do not die. However, that is all it does. It does not continue to boot. Pressing the power button again
does nothing. removing all power sources will get me back to the first state again.

So, if anyone out there has any ideas, let me know.

a little extra background, the previous owner said that for a while the computer would boot only
some of the time. And eventually one day, it just wouldn't boot at all anymore.