Latent is probably not the right word.
I dropped a short metal scrap on a running video card. Obviously not a very good idea. A small spark was seen, and the PSU automatically shut down itself.
I removed the scrap, fiddled with the PSU to reset the breaker, and rebooted the thing. Everything seemed to be working fine, and a short stress test with FurMark produced what I could only see as normal benchmarks with no artifacting.
I'm still extremely worried though that I somehow caused irreparable damage to the video card (I'm not really worried about the PSU). Did I inadvertently kill some parts of the circuits? Will it cause problems later down the road?