The outer part of the aerial socket on the player should be very firmly attached to the metal 'tuner can'. Remember there are two sets of aerial inputs on these, one analogue and one digital so you can compare how they look and feel. The centre part of the socket shouldn't be overly loose or wobbly.
I'll have a look tomorrow (all being well) on how accessible the cap is. This is its location on the diagram, the 0.22 Farad cap. The nature of these caps is such that although they are massive in value, they have quite a high internal resistance and so shouldn't dump masses of current when shorted... although discharging via a resistor is better if you have anything suitable (anything from 100 ohm to 10k). If not then wire it is.
Also the construction of these caps means that a quick short won't pull all the charge out of them. Although the voltage will be zero when shorted, when you remove the short the voltage will tend to creep back up. I wondered about wrapping it in a bit of tin foil for a few minutes. That should hold everything at zero and when the foil is removed the voltage shouldn't wander back up to far.
The cap is at the edge of the main PCB under the HDD. Four screws and the HDD lifts out of the way. You can also see the cap through the holes in the chassis. The edge of the cap that is visible appears to be the + connection and I measured 0.5 volt on my second standby player that hasn't been powered up for around at least 48 hours.
No guarantees, but good luck.
(Leave the cap shorted for a good while (a few hours !) to fully remove all charge. A quick discharge will see the voltage rise again when the short is removed and so we want to try and remove as much of that as possible)
I think there is sufficient current carrying capacity there 
Fingers crossed then !
