Thank you for your advice; I will try it out.About 5 minutes after I posted my original question, I received a response via email:Your filter capacitors are cooked. Any tv repairman can replace these.
Call me an "elitist" or whatever, but "tv repairman" is a key word here.If you don't *know* how to do it, you probably should not try because there is a very high voltage inside the TV that actually *killed* quite a few people trying to fix something without full understanding of the dangers.
-Alex.