Can static electricity cause a blown fuse in amp?

I've tried grounding anything and everything in the signal path and the preamp STILL mutes when the humidity is low enough and the gods are angry. I can even do this by simply touching a tonearm when playing another source (CD)and, believe me, the arm is well grounded as is the turntable itself.

Some years back I took out the whole display of my cd player with a static charge...

What kind of IC's are you guys using? Are they shotgun type (with floating shields?) and if they are, do all arrowheads point to the preamp (including the ones that go between pre and amp?) This is a solvable problem. I know, I live in Tucson where the only way to get the humidity up over 9% is to jump in the pool ;-)
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In my case, I've tried various ICs to no avail. Problem arrived with the preamp (CJ Prem 17LS2), but nobody else seems to have experienced it, and nothing CJ did was any help. They even brought over a duplicate preamp and it muted here just like mine does. Too bad I love the thing, otherwise.

It usually mutes quietly and I've never blown a fuse, but the muting is occasionally accompanied by pretty loud pops.

Static can do a lot of damage. If your pre-amp gets muted then you are lucky. The opposite can happen where the pre goes to full volume. Yes, it happened twice. When you are not ready for this, which is never, you better have an extra pair of underwear ready. That goes for the whole family too! My wife was putting up Christmas decorations on the tree and standing on a ladder. That pre amp went up for sale to someone in a highly humid part of the world. It has not happened since. A properly installed humidifier helps but in Tuscon you might just be wasting water. The humidity in the house when the problem occured was 23% and we were shcoking everthing we touched. When the humidity is in the 30's and higher in the house the static drops drastically. The type of clothes and shoes you wear increase the chances of building up static for sure.
I have sprayed static guard on a cloth and wiped my ic's, power cords and equipment down too. I did this with the last pre but maybe not often enough.