I wonder if there could be another issue. I remember we had a hardware guy once where I worked who took apart a broken cable modem prototype, found that one of the traces was thinly broken. Traces are the lines on a printed circuit board, Vias the circles. He used an emory cloth to strip the protective green coating, then a small narrow heat gun to melt the trace slightly and bring it together.

If OP had a broken trace in there, then heat might have fixed it. Then again, OP's reasoning is probably better as I am not a hardware guy.