John, I accept your analysis, thank you! What finally convinced me was that if I put a pull-down resistor of 2.2kOhm in parallell to R502 the drain voltage of Q501 change is only about 10mV up. It is steady at 7.38V when the source voltage of Q502 is 8.97V. It should be the same, so the conclusion is that Q501 is leaking! I will replace it. Thank you very much for your help