You are using 194's right? I had the same issue last month and anything but 194's, blew super quick. LEDs melted... No joy.

I learned the exact same lesson "is something burning?". Too funny.

Measure the voltage at the socket. Probably a bad resistor somewhere?

Bingo ... 194 bulbs are needed. That's a pretty good bet that he's not using them.

Well there goes my theory. Looks like Barron's recommendation is next. Either you have bad bulbs, or the voltage is out of whack.

check voltage for sure, or you might need to put a resistor into its feed line to drop a little voltage and/or limit the current. slightly dimmer not burning out, is friendlier anyway.
had some nice 12v LED strips that slowly cooked themselves, blues turning dimmer dotted purpley.
replaced them and added 10 ohm 1/4w resistor, I dont notice the strips being dimmer (are they?) but I do see they arent cooking themselves like the last set where 1/3 of them got about baked.

I put leds in, very briefly, and I personally thought it took away from the effect vs incadescents

Original WMS Driver board or Rottendog? New age boards don't work properly, acknowledged by Jim.

I tried LED's when I had a WH20, it never looked as good as 194's.

this was in something entirely different, but similar about voltage and current limiting may apply to save a string of bulbs from frequent burnout if the supply voltage is a good number. PartsExpress.com has some big (10w 20w) 2 and 4 ohm resistors, a couple 2's parallel for 1 ohm or pair of 4's for 2 ohm might drop supply voltage just enough for the bulbs to last. it isnt 115v AC, but an inline dimmer switch from hardware store (even fully turned up) would add a little resistance. if a dimmer gets it done its convenient, adjustable at whim could be nice.

Basically the game uses two low powered coil transistors from the driver board to drive a clock and data line which goes to the chase board which in turn drives the topper lamp boards.

Unfortunately something during the design process got messed up and the lamps are actually wired up in the wrong order. It's possible they didn't know until they got the final foils in and by that time, it was just easier to fix it in software rather than redoing the wiring harnesses. The result is that the game has to write the data for all 16 lamps all at once and then re-write the data all over in order to "advance" the pattern.

Because of this, and because of latency in the game code, it's not a clean clock/data arrangement, but it is still nothing more than an on/off signal from the driver board. Not sure how an aftermarket driver board could mess that up, but...

The 194 lamps should survive a steady ON signal (such as in the topper test mode), so burning them out during normal operation shouldn't happen. If I were to just make a stab at what could be wrong, I'd say you have a bad solder joint on one (or both) of the bridge rectifiers on the chase board or there's too much voltage there, or something. Check that part out very thoroughly.

Replace them now! I don;t care what pinwiki says, I rip them out and replace at the drop of a hat.

Wrong bridges....
The chase boards have their own 4-in-line style small bridges.
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://ww.Team-EM.com
http://webpages.charter.net/chibler/Pinball/index.htm
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

Oh I figured that but a bridge is a bridge in my book....rip'em out!

The operative words for many hobbyists...
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://www.Team-EM.com
http://webpages.charter.net/chibler/Pinball/index.htm
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info