Imac G5 bad caps advice

I have an iMac G5 20" iSight 2.1GHz that stopped working. Made a loud pop one day and shut off. Upon restart it chimes, fan roars, and screen stays black. I've pulled the logic board and power supply for inspection. On the logic board one, and only one, capacitor has a domed top. All the others look like new.
On the power supply, none of the caps has a domed top, but one has what looks (and feels) like a fine gray ash covering half of its top.
I've read the many excellent sites helping with this repair, but I'm still unclear about a couple of things:
1- Do I replace only the obviously bad cap on the logic board, or is it necessary to replace all of them?
2-Any idea if the power supply cap I've described represents a bad cap?
3- And finally, I assume that at some point Apple stopped using these bad caps.
Any idea what model, or model year represents the start of a period when these bad caps were no longer being installed?
Thanks in advance.

Hey Kaynray,
1- Do I replace only the obviously bad cap on the logic board, or is it necessary to replace all of them?
Well ultimately all the caps were probably from the capacitor plague but given the difficulty of replacing them I'd just do the one obviously bad one. These caps are mounted on huge ground planes and it takes a lot of heat to remove them. The danger there is too much heat will damage the board.
Use a desoldering iron like this:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062731
Load the joint up w/ plenty of solder to give the sucking action purchase.
I just repaired a board that was missing two caps. They just weren't there. Must have been a refurb that was defective. Anyway I couldn't clean out the through hole eyelet and wound up drilling out the hole w/ a pin vice and a #60 drill. That's .040". Took 4 minutes for each hole.
2-Any idea if the power supply cap I've described represents a bad cap?
I wouldn't worry about that one unless there's the least amount of doming.
Of course I have an ESR (equivalent series resistance) meter to check just in case.
3- And finally, I assume that at some point Apple stopped using these bad caps.
Any idea what model, or model year represents the start of a period when these bad caps were no longer being installed?
Unfortunately these caps were and continued to be polluting the world market. The latest I've seen or heard of was in 2007 but it doesn't surprise me to find them in even newer products. As to Apple the iSight boards seem to be the most recent ones infected. We had 20 Dells at the school that had the same problem and they were all replaced but later 5 more showed up but Dell wouldn't make good on those. There were a average of 10 bad caps / board so those just got recycled.
Richard

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    Message was edited by: discni
    Message was edited by: discni

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    Hey there!
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    Held power button in to turn off, turn back on, got the chime this time but got stuck on load screen with spinning wheel thing (it stopped spinning).
    Turned off again, turn back on, got the password screen but it wouldn't recognise my password.
    Turned off AGAIN! Back on again this time starting as normal.
    Went to check for updates straight after, tried updating to 10.8.3 and my civilisation game, the game update failed and it asked me to try again which I did and that worked, then turned off to finished the 10.8.3 update which then failed.
    imac is now starting normally and everything seems ok apart from the fact that I'm still on 10.8.2 and the 10.8.3 isn't available in the app store any more.
    Tried update to 10.8.3 via combo download on Apple site but that failed also, saying it could open the disk image or something.
    Things I've done:
    Checked and Repaired permissions, verified disk.
    I recently install Eastwest Symphonic orchestra which I'm running with Logic Pro 9 and an iLok - This was working fine for a day or two.
    imac now boots normally with my MIDI keyboard, audio interface, external hardrive and iLok connected.
    So much stuff has happened to my imac today it's been crazy! With important projects in progress this in worrying from Apple!
    Any suggestions for further action?
    Karl.

    Many thanks for the reply.
    Changed my info, thanks for pointing that out.
    I reset the PRAM and held the power button in to reset the other thing whilst the power cable was out. Booted normally after this.
    Few questions:
    How will re-installing the OS affect my system? Will all my files and data be intact?
    If I do re-install which OS will I get? My imac didn't come with Mountain Lion.
    Are you saying the update will work after reinstalling OS?
    To someone who's never re-installed their Mac OS before it seems a little over kil, but if it's a common thing to do then there shouldn't be a problem.
    Will let you know if it continues.
    Karl.l

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