[MadMan]

Alright, so I assembled the circuit as described, and it causes some pretty wild image instability :/

Some tearing near the top always, with image/scene changes the horizontal and vertical stabilities change, sometimes the image jumps halfway down the screen, other times its starts to roll. Contrast control used to affect image stability, but now contrast, brightness, and focus have drastic effects on it. And at all times, no matter what, the image is never perfect. At best it's skewed and jittery, and ripple-y.

That all having been said, I *think* it helps the DC restoration, but it's kind of hard to tell when the image is getting as screwed up as it does.

So I'm thinking. This shouldn't affect anything but the brightness and contrast, yeah? Is there some way of isolating it (more) from the rest of the workings? Or wait. The path to the cathode used to be a capacitor and resistor, so that would mean it's capacitively coupled, but with a limited straight connection. Now it's just capacitive only. Would a resistor over the first cap help?

EDIT: I also tried a 1k resistor for R5, it barely made a difference.