*TLDR skip to TLDR section below*
Yesterday evening I did allot of scoping around.
The crazy ripple I mentioned was present on pins 4,5 & 7 of U139 as I had previously seen with my DMM.
I used freeze spray on U139 and that did seem to settle the ripple allot.
However since it is a densely populated board it could be another nearby component, or something on the underside...
I never got rid of the ripple completely though so in the end I started looking for a PCB crack or bad soldered component.
But touching everything on the top of the PCB had no effect, so I flipped the PCB over again.
As I mentioned in my OP and reply #1 the last time I did I had stable reference voltage once, but not this time.
I looked around the back for something that would affect the ripple but nothing did, and I was about to give up.
Then suddenly the ripple disappeared and the meter was able to autorange fine.
For example before if I measured a 9V battery it could not autorange to the 10v range, but I could select it manually.
But before the reading was so unstable due to the ripple that the meter could show basically any random voltage value.
Now it was dead on, only effected by the tempco of the battery itself.
I measured a 2.5v voltage reference and it came up a little low but still very good at 2.49985v
At this stage I figured I would have the same experience as in my OP: that is after powering off and on the device it would fail.
But it did not, so I put the board back into the case, and still it worked.
So I thought ok, I will leave it and come back tomorrow because I had noticed quite large differences before related to the temperature of the instrument.
But to my surprise today it powered on fine again, I also noticed that the reference voltage appeared instantly.
I wrote in my reply #12 that with the 18K resistor in series with R315 the reference voltage appeared instantly.
But after that reply I noticed that if I let the device cool down completely over an hour it would take 10 to 15 seconds for the reference voltage to come up.
So I desoldered the 18K parallel resistor I had added to R315 and the reference voltage still came up instantly!
And now my 2.5v reference measured dead on 2.50000v, which could be just a coincidence since it is a €20 eBay AD584-M, but still!
Finally I initiated a selftest and it passed all of the tests without errors!
TLDR: So with my now out of the blue working meter I am not sure I want to be happy or not, since the cause was never found.
But I added some scope shots below &
put up a video showing the issue with the crazy ripple which is now gone after the work above.
After this there is still a pretty crazy waveform at pin 3 of Q129 & Q130 (the unregulated 20v input, infact this ripple did not change)
But this ripple does not exist in other places of the unit, for example at R168 it is the expected sawtooth waveform.
You can see in my previous reply when VR109 was dead how the ripple then was present there too, but now it is a perfect sawtooth at R168
I guess this is why Q129/VR112 & Q130/VR113 gets so hot...
I need to replace VR109 because my THT replacement looks very ugly and is also unable to create a perfect stable voltage: there is some AC ripple let through.
I'm actually contemplating replacing R168 270Ω with a 1KΩ resistor because I do not understand why it needs to be that low, it creates allot of heat in the zener!