well, thanks guys for all the advice and suggestions.... i went ahead and attempted this fix today.
my first reaction is that it was a lot harder than I expected. i've done repairs of PSUs and some other electronics before and never had such a hard time as I did today. all in all, I think it took me over 4 hours to finally get this done. at first, i couldn't get the heat to transfer through the wick to pickup the solder as the solder wouldn't melt. if I made direct contact with the solder, it melted within a few seconds. through the wick, it didn't seem to get hot enough. i had plenty of flux, and took the suggestion and flowed some extra solder on the joint - didn't really seem to help. i then devised my own technique, which was contrary to how I previously learned to use the wick; that was to do a "drive by"... I would melt the solder joint with direct contact, and then wipe the wick quickly on the joint. that was the only way I was able to get any solder off. however, even with that, i wasn't able to get enough solder off to remove the broken leads of the crystal that fell off. that was about 1.5 hrs into the job.
finally, i had to think outside the box a little bit, with my limited experience with this stuff... so i got some side cutting pliers and grabbed the tip of the broken leads and applied upward pressure. i then melted the solder joint with direct contact (no wick) and the broken lead wire started to move upward, if only a little bit at a time, it was at least progress. moving the lead wire up half a millimeter at a time, half an hour later i finally got them out.
then came the hardest part.... since I didn't really remove the solder to get the broken leads out, there was solder in the holes, which wouldn't allow me to insert the leads of the new crystal i received. i don't recall how i came about the idea, but I picked apart the strands in the wick, and using only maybe 3-5 strands at a time, i would insert it into the tiny hole and then push the soldering iron tip in there. this was the only way I could come up with that actually showed some progress as at least i saw some solder on the copper strands of the wick when i pulled them out. rinse and repeat of this process for about 2 hours and i finally got the 1 hole completely cleaned out. the other hole was making progress too, but still had solder in it. i then decided to try a different approach... i put the leads of the new crystal in the holes from the back side and applied pressure with my hands with the board standing up vertically. I then put the tip of the iron into the hole from the opposite side and as the solder melted in the hole, i was able to push the lead of the new crystal through. the other hole was cleaned out nicely so that went through easily. got the new crystal positioned and added some solder and trimmed the lead wires down and i was finally done.
15 minutes later, I had it reassembled in the 846 chassis and ready to test. got down on my knees, put my hands together to pray, and asked the wife to hit the power switch.... woo hooo!!!! it worked!
the problematic ports were the last 8 on the left side of the last picture. the middle 8 ports don't have any drives no blue leds.