Cleaning a Circui board, Warning big pics

I need some help from the guys that remember the days when circuit board repair was the norm rather than simply garbaging and buying the newest model.     My radar detector was working fine one day and dead the next.  It’s about 8 years old and was wired into my car so that if the car was on, it was on.  LOL, usually the safest practice for me was to always use it.  Even with its age it worked really good.  Better than many newer models I have seen.

Well so she died and I took it apart to see what the deal was and I was greeted with this……          I’d like to try cleaning the board and see if maybe I am lucky and the corrosion has just finally gotten to be enough to short a trace or something like that.   I know it has been submitted to the high humidly we have on the west coast and heated and cooled a lot. 

So you got any suggestions on how to clean her up.      The unit itself is not expensive anymore, I paid something like $200 for it when I bought it, however I checked eBay and used ones of the same model are only about 40 bucks now.   However it has been perfect and I love it, so I would like to keep it.

Here are some high res shots I grabbed with my digital camera.   I know it looks bad, really bad, but hey, its apart on my bench now, and it will only take a min to put it back together, so I'd like to know what is the best stuff to use to clean it.    I do have some electrical contact cleaner here that I use on stuff like ECM plugs and such in the Fiero, would that be safe to use on the bare board?

Be prepared to look away at first glance as it does look horrible. 

Well I used an old toothbrush and lots of 2 diffrent kinds of cleaners one for contacts and one that is specifically for cleaning circut boards.

I just want to thank everyone that posted and replied with suggestions.

I cleaned it about 4 times, each time spraying off all the stuff from the previous clean and starting over.

Here is the final clean

and the final result.

http://www.captfiero.com/circutboard/result.avi

WooHoo, it works and I am safe to go driving again.

Oh for the record its a Whistler 1650 detector.