Re: Cleaning and repairing a Corroded computer board
One of the problems with liquid corrosion is that it tends to turn solder into something else entirely, something which will just refuse to melt at the touch of a soldering iron. So you find an IC with half the legs dissolved off it and then try to desolder the remains of the legs from the PCB and clear the holes, and that's often when the fun really starts.
The other problem is that like rust on a car, once it gets going, it keeps going. Even if you identify several tracks and through-holes which have rotted away and repair them, a few months / a couple of years later the rot will often be found to have spread further and caused even more damage.
At work we generally declare PCBs with more than the slightest amount of fluid ingress damaged beyond repair. In some cases we could make them work, but we wouldn't be able to guarantee they would keep working, not with the time we generally have available to work on them.
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