thank you, i'll see if i have a supply that can source enough current to try that.
about the capacitor. it fell off when i was probing last week when i first encounter the problem. i cleaned the pads today, the only new development, regarding the hardware, is seeing there is still a short on that rail. there's another development, i plugged the os drive to my desktop, booted from it, and see the shutdown happened as scheduled according to the event viewer, so whatever killed that chip and anything else that is dead happened either on shutdown or after the computer was already off. I had scheduled a shutdown(falling asleep to a netflix show) so i was asleep when the computer died, but good to know it didn't happen when the computer was still on, that could be a clue, at least going from the power sequence timing in the pdf.
thanks again!
(still would appreciate a boardview if anyone would like to share)
edit:
thinking about it a bit more, it seems whatever happened at the exploded IC's location was not the cause, but a symptom. its output doesn't have current limiting protections in place, so i think it likely that the 1 ohm short on the rail pulled too much current and caused the explosion. this does not explain the shorted cap at its input tho, nor how it could have happened at or after shutdown, hmmm!