[Eliot Ness]

.....But that doesn't answer WHY it worked for many months before.. With Ground wire connected..

Thats the question...

One of your components is breaking down and shorting to the chassis.  If you're lucky you might see some slight arcing in a room with the lights out (and ground hooked up), otherwise you could lift components or take voltage readings across likely suspects with and without the ground wire attached.

I'd pay particular attention to the tube sockets,  grommets and the wires passing through them.  So far you've found a bad resistor, two bad capacitors, a bad 1626, and a suspect 1629.  Try a different 1629 eye tube and you might get lucky.