MSD Failure

[frankym]

spoke to MSD this evening and the steps they walked me through are as follows:
1. remove center wire from dist. Cap
2. lay wire on side near metal
3. disconnect green and violet union and
4. jump the green and violet (from the leads of box)
5. each time contact is made between green and violet, center wire wire should arc

6. if that doesn’t work, keep the allegator clips attached from green and violet, jump the red (small wire) from the box directly to the battery, see if the wire arcs

7. box has a melted chip inside the box, replace it and reinstall with capacitor.

I am not certain that I understand what all of this will prove, if I can get spark or not, the fact remains that the box is fried. How will manually getting a spark isolate the problem. MSD said short of adding the in line capacitor, there isn't much else they can think of, the most frustrating part of this is that if I install the reparied box with the new capacitor and it fails again, I am out again for 3 weeks, there must be other measures to take to ensure that I do everything possible to avoid these recurring failures! Any thing else to check? Maybe when I get it running there are things I should me monitoring like using a volt meter or something to check the voltage, get a new voltage regulator etc>?