Water Damage = Strange Startup Behaviour

A week ago I was stupid enough to spill water on the keyboard of my laptop while it was on. I turned it off, dried it off as best i could and left it for a few days. No dice -- or so I thought. At the moment, one of a few things happen when i press the power button:

1.) It starts up fine (not happening particularly often though)
2.) The bios screen loads before telling me it cannot find an internal hard drive and that it doesn't know what the time is. When this happens, i am able to boot using an Ubuntu live CD. Plus, if i retry then somtimes 1.) happens.
3.) Other than the powerlight turning on, nothing happens.

Also, when things are working normally, the hotkeys at the top of the keyboard light up in sequence after pressing the power button. Sometimes there's a delay -- from 5 seconds to 30 -- before this happens. The laptop then proceeds to one of the steps above.

To me, that would sound like some sort of bad connection. But i'm not convinced on that. When the laptop does start up it, touch wood, works perfectly. It's been running for nearly 3 hours now without a hitch. Plus, i'm struggling to see how water would cause a loose connection of some kind.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.