And opened up the back plane in the freezer...FROSTY!

just a bit icy old boy. Is it Self defrost or what???

The hole in the middle left of the bottom tray goes down to a plate above the compressor (which gets hot, and therefor evaporates the water). I'm guessing the black horizontal rods that are directly beneath the "rad" are supposed to be warm in order for ice to not build up on the fins (but not too warm to offset the cooling). I'm gonna plug it back in once all the ice is gone and hopefully I can figure out what does what (or doesn't do what).

ORRRR...http://www.appliance411.com/faq/howdefrostworks.shtml read that!

Older model's need to be regularly "defrosted" I remember doing that as a kid. Haven't seen it in years tho due to changes in design

I'll have to see if the "defroster" wire is working or not.

It has been a long time since I had to fix a freezer but there are defrost timers that can fail and need to be replaced, and that is usually the first thing to do when you get frost that bad. Hit up google for an image and it should be easy to spot where it is in your freezer, and usually they are cheap and really easy to replace (1 big connector).

The capacitor thingy that powered the defroster apparently blew out. I'm letting y'all know since you were all incredibly worried about my lack of very cold booze.

How much was the fix and how did you find that out? Repairman?

I be an apartment dweller (I don't own it, so I don't pay to fix it). I'm guessing it's a 10$ part that took about 5 minutes to fix (wasn't home at the time), since he already knew what the problem was, and I supplied him with that frosty pic I posted here earlier on in the thread...

Sounds like they've had a few of their fridges break like that already then. Still, I was hoping you'd say you found the manually online and traced the problem back to that and swapped the component out yourself. It would have made for a better story.

Yeah if I owned it, I'd fix it.