Enlighten a total novice

[Paul Perry]

At 01:12 AM 1/07/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Before this topic came up on the list, I'd never heard of washing the flux
off the circuit board, or even having separate flux from the solder.
>
>1.  How do you keep the water from corroding the leads and components on
the other side of the board?

Components are water proof.
When things are desperate, people actually wash boards in diswashers (TRUE!)

>2.  What's the advantage of cleaning the flux?  Is it a performance
improvement 

yes, especially for ckts with high impedances.
Really mysterious faults can be traced to erratic leakages over board
surfaces, via flux residue and other goop (even finger print acids).

paul perry melbourne australia 

plenty of stuff on this in "The Art of Electronics" Horowitz and Hill.