These radios have the TA7222 amp powered up on transmit or receive. Muting for transmit is applied at pin 5.
C145 may be leaky causing a DC voltage on the speaker but it could be caused in other places.
I see a lot of these low cost mobile radios and their major problem is solder connections or some tweaker has been into it.
I agree,-some positive volts on pin 3 should mute the thing OK,as pointed out in the datasheet.As for your question.......Pin5 has a cap on it.
Generally talkback is desirable. It allows you to hear if the microphone is breaking up.
If you were to remove D80 then talkback would be on all the time. TR36 supplies power to the transmit circuits while TR38 is used to supply power to the receive circuits. If you were to get power from the collector of TR36 with a resistor to the muting pin3 on the TA7222, you may get the muting you desire.
Or you may try replacing some of the capacitors connected to the TA7222, one of them may be defective and causing the problem.
I haven't known this popping to be common problem and I haven't seen the tda2003 used on these Ranger boards yet.They all have this problem up until 2006 when they changed to the tda2003 ic.