The radio left for Yaesu today.  Good conversations by phone and email to their tech support personnel.  I also ordered the AF gain knob and potentiometer for my ft817 for less than $20.  (2 year old daughter got my attention that way) 

This is from an email conversation.

"The flashing TX light is telling you that you have a short on the PRR line
someplace. Are you using a CW key or an interface box of some kind connected
to the rear of the radio? If you are using an MD-100 microphone make sure
that the PTT switch on the microphone itself is not pressed in. You might
want to disconnect everything from the radio and then see if the problem
goes away. If not then you can send it to us for repair but in every case
where we saw this, there was a short from an external device."

Unfortunately this short is inside the rig in my case.  I did visually inspect each board in this radio and look for damage.  Which I found none.  I am very impressed with the cooling system in this radio. 
Tonight I will test the mic, straight key and soundcard interface on my ft817.
Hopefully I will not have any issues with them as they have been reliable for years. 

Called Yaesu service, they said the flashing TX is a protection feature to prevent the radio from transmitting on power up.  So this leads me to believe that either a PTT relay, IC, or optocoupler from the CAT port is stuck on transmit.  I use this radio almost exclusively for 6M meteor scatter.  Time to crack the case and do some digging.  So much for September VHF this weekend unless I get it fixed before then.

AC5UP, thanks again for the link to the service manual.

My old versa tuner does that on 75 and 160m.  The previous owner used a "military antenna" that had an SWR of 3.5:1.  The inductor coils heated up and melted the waxy plastic insulation, which made the coils touch and fused some of the solder points together.  About 30 minutes of heat and toothpicks got them spaced apart again but the arcing problem remains.  But I am not much of a lowbander anyway.

Tried the Relay cleaning mode.  PWR on while holding BAND UP and DOWN.  Still nothing...

I found a tiny switch on the bottom of the rig near the RF gain and AF gain knobs.  Programming switch I think.  No help from that.

That link works!  Thanks

No I have not read the Service manual, the link does not work. 

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /schemi/FT450_serv.pdf on this server.

My rig will not transmit on any band.

I read that thread first.  No solution has worked yet.  My rig is one month out of warranty

My FT450 has a problem.  The TX light is flashing.  I cannot transmit at all.  I have done everything I can think of ... hard resets, factory reset, unplugged all cables and yanked the power cables.  Still flashing.
Any ideas?

Conditions were pretty poor in my area.  At the start of the contest, I worked a few stations in Florida.  Saturday was a bust.  I got up early Sunday morning and scanned for beacons but none were heard.  Worked Montana on Meteor Scatter and the band opened to California for about an hour.  Ended up with 38 QSO's and 21 grids. 
I did get to test out a new 4 element Hygain.  I received many unsolicited comments on my signal and audio.

I will have to stop by.  Do you guys run every saturday night?

1- Headset is better than a boom mic
2- Boom mic is better than a desk mic
3- any thing is better than a hand mic.
4- when the band drops out, hunt for a beacon.  then keep your antenna pointed at the beacon and find a calling frequency.
5- have patience with weak signals, and control the pileups.  When pileups get out of hand (they can quickly), try running grid prefixes instead of call prefixes.  There may be twenty W6 stations calling, but maybe only one in CN, etc..

I plan to be active this year from DM83
3 element Cushcraft is coming down and a 4 element Hygain is going up.
Running FT-450 @ 100w.

Made a clean sweep last year including the England station with 100w from home on my 5 band hamstick array.
This year I was on vacation in east Texas with my FT817 and a dipole.
I ended up working four colonies with only 2 watts on SSB. 
I wish I would have remembered to take my straight key.

I have a Tempo One also.  The person I bought it from had an 11 meter crystal in the 10 meter spot. 
Currently it is out on loan to a friend who has no hf rig.  But a great rig!
I saw one at a hamfest last year in perfect working order for $100.  I should have bought it.

That is correct Alan.  I cannot make a value judgement based on my experiences or my friends and acquaintances experiences.  The fact that I have owned an FT857d for 6 years means nothing.  The fact that one of my friends IC7000 has been to Icom three times is irrelevant for the same problem (RF output drivers).  In fact, Icom even shipped his rig back the last time with an extra set of parts.  Why would they do that?  Probably because it WILL happen again.  My other friend, who had his radio repaired twice by Icom...guess what same problem and he got extra parts also.   So if all of this means nothing then I suppose it in no way influenced them to look at Kenwood and Yaesu to replace their 7000's as a primary HF radio.