Yes, inverting and delay to a clock signal can have very similar effects. Chips and things that respond to a clock signal generally actually trigger on the rising or falling edge of the signal, not the actual voltage levels themselves. If you invert it the rising signal becomes a falling signal, and the falling edge becomes a rising edge (the signal forms an edge in both of these instances), whereas if you delay a signal both signals come later in time. But if the chip is looking at the rising edge, swapping the signal will put that signal where the falling edge would normally come, a millisecond or two later perhaps. Delaying the signal by a small fraction of a second will have the same effect, but if it's triggering on the falling edge, that will actually come before the rising edge when inverting but significantly later if you delay.
The only unexplained bit for me is how removing a resistor results in a delay to the clock line. A capacitor will effectively smooth out the clock, causing a kind of delay to the time a transistor inside the chip activates. Perhaps it used to be used as a kind of low pass filter using a resistor and a capacitor, and removing that resistor effectively disables that signal entirely, perhaps leaving the capacitor as a kind of smoothing capacitor (but on the clock signal). If there's any sense in that, I can't see how it would be significantly affected by a change in the ambient temperature.