I’ve noticed that certain circuits (particularly inputs buffers with any sort of diode) fail on me after successful testing. Some are circuits that have been said should never have worked to begin with. Some of these issues are well documented on this forum. That being said, I’m currently in the stages of testing a clock divider that I have been successfully using with a 555 clock on breadboard. I’ve been using it with an LFO as well. The LFO the clock and the dividers are all on the same breadboard actually. They all have decoupling. I just sat down to add some 1K pull-down resistors to my outputs as per suggestion and my circuit will no longer take a signal from the 555 clock. I had to add decoupling to my 555 output and remove a diode in the signal path to get it working again. diodes also seem to be a factor in common with my malfunctioning circuits for some reason…
“I have anomalous effects on electricity”
Ha ha, stop flattering yourself. You can not have an effect on nature (the laws of physics) that big!
Ok, it is difficult to respond to your post without maybe being a bit direct ( Heck, I’m Dutch, so what do you expect? ), which some might describe as a bit rude. But here goes …
Without a schematic it is hard to weight any of your remarks and the ‘suggestions made’, but:
Logically speaking: If the circuits fail on you after successful testing, then your tests do not cover everything involved to make the circuit work or the transfer from the test to the working environment causes the working to stop.
Why is that? Do they need it? Can you provide a schematic?
Why do you follow the suggestion? Is it any good or not?
To me that would be an incentive to read up on diodes. They are not complex things, and from your post I gather they are used in the logic of combining several building blocks. In such cases most times they are merely used (together with a pull down or pull up resistor) to combine signals while excluding that conflicting signals will cause shorts.
You speak about ‘decoupling’. What do you mean by that?
A divider ordinarily does not need any decoupling because ordinarily it is used in a DC setting. So why is there decoupling? And from what is it decoupled? Please provide a schematic.
If you have a regular LFO, then that produces a voltage that goes above and below 0V. The divider probably can process only a voltage from 0 volts and up. So there is a mismatch between the LFO and the divider. Again, without a schematic I’m just guessing here.
Right. Im just venting. Lol. If I really understood the problem, it might be something I’d go into detail about. However, I think I will try to read up on diodes. The thing is I’m using them according to the schematics and sometimes I just have to take them out and get around them somehow. I think it may have had something to do with my 4017s not being that great either. Two of them flaked out on me today when I was building my divider module. I’m ok with blaming it on that for now. I kind of put those things through hell. they were the last three I had. I had the module completely built and was running a test on it when it started to get all glitchy and shorted out. Im familiar with how a burnt out 4017 starts misbehaving so I was kind of relieved when I realized that’s what was going on. So when I get some fresh 4017s in the mail that haven’t already been abused by me I think everything will be okay. 
I knew problem didn’t have anything to do with the pull-down resistors I was putting in as a suggestion from the forum. It just happened to be at that point the problem became apparent. Like I was saying though, I’m hopeful that plugging these new chips and should take care of the problem. Thanks for taking the time to talk me through it though, my friend!
New 4017 ics installed and I got all divisions on all outs. 