Matthew,

It's quite hard to tell what the problem is in these circunstances. Possible cause could be thermal issues in which the CPU overheats or a fault memory chip causing a bit to flip and the CPU to crash.

Still, with these issues I'd expect the symtoms to vary - I'd expect kernel panics and-or SIGSEGV's in the player's code (but I don't know how the display is driven by the CPU - a crash of the application might cause just this). Another cause might be spurious interrupts that cause the CPU to halt or at least trap in the kernel.

You might want to try and hook up a keyboard or move the disc to another machine and mount it (if you do not have Linux installed you can download a Knoppix bootable image that is a fully operational Linux system on CD). I would be interested if there is a /var/log directory with system logs and see what's in them. They might (provided that they exist) shed some light on the problem.

As for solder joints - I've taken the board out and I think it has at least 4 layers - the top and bottom are mainly ground shielding and power - the remainder is neatly tucked away and is absolutely unreachable...

If you need any more assistance in getting Linux up, mounting the partitions and/or analyzing the logs just ask.

Jeroen