Ok, I come back to this thread to retract my statement, I did not think that such a fine instrument can have such stupid design flaw. I bought two 34401A a couple of months ago and somehow I missed that one had a blown tantalum at C312. The series Zener was short so instead of -15V, U308 saw -18V, and all was ok...apparently... functionally.
Looking at the schematic I can't believe HP engineers selected 20V caps on a 15V supply voltage. I doubt the 2X+ derating rule for tantalum caps wasn't know then.
Anyway, there are 5 capacitors that are more likely to burn C311, C312, C322, C323 and to some extent C559, although it sees 12V only and it is rated at 20V so please REPLACE these tantalum caps ASAP.
All the others are pretty much ok, 5V with 20v or 10V caps, 18v with 35V caps. I replaced all those mentioned before with caps rated at 35V and I'll be ordering a bunch of 3.3V Zener diodes.
I'm curious if anybody saw any burnt tantalum caps in 34401A, other than the five that I mentioned before.
Cheers,
Miti