I have a couple of friends that fly for Malaysian, they don't have any reservations about their maintenance program so I'm not really too incline to think that the previous damage had anything to do with this. I also flew that night although from Bangkok to Narita and the weather was clear all over SE Asia.
What's eating away at me is that ATC and the company stated that they lost contact with the A/C 2 hours into the flight, but the suspected area is 400 miles from Kuala Lumpur??? That would be 45 minutes into the flight (specially with the prevailing winds that evening) in a 4:50 planned flight, 2 hours would put them NE of the coast of Vietnam, just about being handover to Hong Kong??????