Classic Hot Tip: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I was inspired to give shielded wire another go as I realized I had a roll of VGA cable sitting here. Plan was to replace the couple other little caps I didn't have before and hook up the new shielded wire setup. Spent about 6 hours doing it. VGA wire suuuuuucks. Such a pain in the ass. Try it out annnd.. No picture or OSD or sound. Excellent. Only problem I could find was the Sync wire was shorting to ground on its own shielding. Remedied that and still nothing.
TV powers on and I get a raster. Pretty pissed off at myself. Didn't want to spend my weekend dicking around with this and already spent 4 hours this morning messing with it. Not sure whats wrong, research suggests it's somewhere in the video/chroma circuit or maybe low power supply circuit. Don't even know where to begin. Don't feel like aimlessly test probing ten thousand different spots and looking at a schematic til my eyes bleed. Oh well. Probably another junk board.
Edit: And now it's got picture/OSD again. And I haven't done anything except take it in and out and probe crap.
And immediately after I say that, I plug the TV speakers into the board and the image goes away again and now it won't come back. Looks like I've got a short somewhere tied to the audio.
Edit2: Un-flippin-believable. Shes workin again and I guess I found the issue. At least so far. One of the factory solder joints had come loose on one of the big resistors, I guess from shifting the board around. Impossible to see, except that I had it hooked up and running and just happened to apply pressure on the board just the right way and viola.. static! I had previously jiggled the board and connections to no avail. Once I saw that it was something in the left area of the board (non-HV stuff), I put on a rubber glove and proceeded to carefully touch and feel around that area til the picture came back. Re-soldered and BAM! Hell f'n yea. Now I have to reinstall the whole shielded cable SCART setup again and hope it still works.
Edit3: Well it sorta worked with the shielded wire setup. Picture didn't seem clear. Something seemed buzzy. Maybe I wired it up wrong, but I am not happy at all with how it all looks anyway. Wiring the VGA is so sloppy and annoying. Wires as thin as a hair just break off from twisting, fifty extra unneeded wires in there etc. Don't care anymore. Clearly I don't have the patience or dexterity to handle VGA cable. Took it all back out, reinstalled my ribbon cable setup and all is working again. Looks great and works. Good enough for me. Best of luck to anyone else. This post is an emotional rollercoaster