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Yes, RCA has had a lot of solder joint problems from the mid-80's through the 90's in the tuners and control modules, even though they use different types of tuner modules through these years. In the later ones like yours, Jeffhs, the solder cracks around the board-mounted tuner and ends up messing up the data in the EEPROM if the problem goes on too long. Most of these problem sets are CTC 177. I have fixed some of these successfully in the early stages of the problem by resoldering all the joints to the tuner shield box and any other bad joints inside there and then resoldering the shield cover back on.
Thomson has come out with a template and special solder that they supplied to authorized service centers to help fix this, but I was able to get it with regular solder just as long as I caught it early enough when the symptoms were still just intermittents. By the time the picture disappears totally it is too late, the EEPROM has had it. I believe that there is a proprietary computer system that authorized servicers can use to reprogram these. Lacking such, I have never been able to fix one of these once the EEPROM got messed up. The problem with these sets is that ALL of the adjustments are in the EEPROM, the tuner control settings, the vertical height and horiz. frequency, etc. so if it goes you're in trouble.
I think probably the best RCA design was probably the CTC-16. The portable tube type sets are usually pretty good too with good CRT's, like the CTC-53. The chassis on the early 80's sets, like the CTC-92 and 101 are pretty good, too, especially once they got rid of the modules.
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