Hey, if my time were THAT valuable, I wouldn't be posting in the first place, I'd be off saving the world or making fat stacks or something. I don't mind the 2 minutes it takes to write a response.
Grounding the bridge to a pot isn't a horrible idea as long as a ground loop isn't created. Ultimately, that's really the only concern: "ground loop or not". It's black and white, and if you don't have a ground loop you're in the clear.
Shielding actually makes it trickier to avoid ground loops, because at that point in time, your pot is touching the shield and therefore adding itself to THAT circuit. Then if you have a wire connected to your pot, you have a strong potential for a ground loop. Star grounding is a good idea in any event, but I think it's particularly useful for avoiding pitfalls in a shielding project.
If you HADN'T already solved it, I would have mentioned that you definitely had a problem anyhow-- when you're sitting right in front of a CRT monitor, your level of hum WILL increase significantly even with humbuckers. I use this trick on PURPOSE at times to help trouble-shoot my setup. So if the level of hum didn't change either way, you definitely had an unnatural level of hum, as you discovered.
Just thought I'd add that for posterity in case anyone's looking at this topic in the future via the "search" function.
Greg