Ha, reminds me of something at a company I used to work at! One of their products included this little switched power supply of some kind. I don't recall the

Ha, reminds me of something at a company I used to work at! One of their products included this little switched power supply of some kind. I don't recall the exact details, but basically it included a snubber circuit that was failing due to some transients being larger than designed for. So they fixed it by.. removing the snubber. That worked briefly, but then of course the transistor it was protecting started failing. So they installed a massive overkill transistor, which worked for a while, until that started overheating, so they redesigned the PCB to move it to the edge of the board where it could be heat-sinked to the case. Even with that they were still getting occasional returns with it failed, so when I joined the company I was asked to look at it. Added the snubber back in with an appropriately-sized resistor, and problem solved. (And was able to switch back from the $30 transistor to one that cost a few cents.)