Killing the pests or my plants? Mealys and Scale

[northernorchids]

Ok, my plants (and me) have had a very stressful year. We both survived the house fire last June. Poor plants went w/o lights or care in a smoky house for almost a week before I could get them moved out. Then they lived outdoors all summer. Fall/winter they had to live in the basement of our rental in crowded conditions but at least they had light and heat. During all this Mealy bugs started showing up. I tried to deal w/them but was to busy w/the house mess to keep up, so neglect made things get worse. Now we are back in our house and I'm trying to play catch up and I see scale has joined the mealys. A few plants I've tossed, others I've trimmed back dead stuff and removed ALL flower stocks (the flowers seem to be really attracting the mealys). I've cleaned trays, clips and name tags and sprayed them w/an insecticidal soap. I can't repot right now so I resorted to dipping each plant pot and all into a bucket w/the same insecticidal soup in it, then rubbing each leaf to remove bugs. My goal was to treat plant, pot and soil, getting into cracks and crevices that spraying wouldn't reach.
I've read on these boards to use a Bayer product that has a systemic in it, so I bought a Bayer product for fruits and vegs that is a systemic and plan to water all my plants w/that next week after they've had a change to dry out some. I may resort to dipping the pots in that also.
Any other suggestions? I hope I haven't killed them all, but at this point I figured the bugs were going to anyway.
I have mostly Phals and Oncidiums, a few Paphs, Pfrags and some misc. The Phals seem to have suffered the most.