I believe your neighbor is wrong. It's just about impossible for this to be a valve issue. The controller only provides power to the solenoids of the valves. If the valve is "broken", the controller wouldn't know it, it would still try to run the station. Since you've already mentioned in manual mode it skips the station in question, so that pretty much will eliminate it being a valve issue.
MrFixit seems to be heading you down the right path of where to look.
Worst case, you might have to just replace the controller, but is you record exactly which wire goes where on the current controller, that should be a fairly simple DIY job if need be.