Hello, now you could try to check the voltages again, just to be sure the fault is not on the 245.
Following the traces is of course obviously difficult, but if the board is really only two-sided (no internal signal layers), components are not too high, and you have a flatbed scanner, you could scan both sides, then colorize top in green and bottom in red, flip bottom and do a properly aligned overlay with a graphic editor like GIMP. It's a matter of few minutes, but could improve the work. When you are unsure, try with the multimeter. Andrea
