I guess I never wrote up my experience. In short, doing the soldering was painless and the TV's been running happily ever after.

Thanks to the power of Google, I discovered that other owners of my TV were experiencing identical problems to my own. (Google search on the exact model number was the key.) Based on that, the diagnosis was that the op-amps that drive the CRT steering magnets were shot. There are basically two large op-amp chips, each of which has three op-amps inside it (one does the X-axis for each of the three color guns, while the other does the Y-axis). Without even opening up my TV, I ordered the parts from an online reseller (cost, maybe $30).

I left the TV powered down for a week (no way do I want to deal with big, ugly capacitors shorting across my body). Meanwhile, I borrowed a professional soldering iron from work, some solder and a dinky board to practice on. I was having a hell of a time tinning the tip of the soldering iron. I ended up going to the local electronic parts store and buying a new tip (screwdriver-shaped, I forget the price, but it was pretty cheap), as well as a really swank solder sucker.

Now, the soldering worked exactly like it was supposed to. I was happily attaching and detaching a resistor from my practice board. Finally, on to the real TV.

I extracted the board from the TV like I was supposed to, first taking a bunch of pictures so I'd know what went where. There were a whole bunch of power connectors and other things I had to unplug which looked identical to one another. Luckily, they were white. I marked those up with a Sharpie, photographed some more, and took it all apart. The hardest part was that there were some screws holding the board down requiring me to use a stubbly screwdriver in tight quarters.

Okay, now I've got the board with the dead op-amps on it. Well, several resistors on the board were clearly burned to a crisp. I ended up finding the repair manual for my TV (again, thanks to copious Google searching), which thankfully had resistance values for all the resistors. One more trip to the electronics parts store, and I was good to go.

Desoldering and resolding was relatively straightforward. The op-amps connect to a big aluminum heat sink, so I used some heat sink paste, normally for CPUs, on my new op-amps.

Okay, I put it all back together again, powered it up, and it worked! Kinda. The convergence was messed up beyond what the "Magic" auto-converger could fix. This required more advice from the net about how to use some weird remote-control combinations to get you into the service menu. With that, I reconverged the set properly, and it's been running flawlessly since then.

Total cost: less than $50 in parts, one favor to borrow the soldering iron, two or three round-trips to the electronics parts store, and half a day's labor.

If I actually knew what I was doing, and had the correct diagnosis from the get go, I imagine it would only be an hour of labor. If I knew what I was doing but had to actually diagnose the problem, then I can only imagine it could take much longer. If somebody wants to charge you $300, that's probably reasonable, all things considered. If somebody wants to charge you $500 (which isn't unreasonable), then maybe it's time to get a new TV.