How do you fix a watch that stopped and whose battery died and the watch won't start?

After I replaced the battery...I have to get the back on for continuity to get it working, right? I am soaking it in alchohol tonight with a little WD-40 mixed in. Tomorrow I will dry and try again....if I can get the back cover to snap back on!

It depends on the type of watch this is, which you did not tell us. There are two types, electro-mechanical (EM) and digital. If digital, then the likely cause is corrosion on the terminals in the watch which prevent good electrical contact with the battery. You can try an eraser, the kind used for INK, not the kind used for lead pencil and literally scrub the contact surfaces. If you have one small enough and shaped in a cylinder, you simply twirl it between your fingers and it will scrub the contact surface as it rotates. I've done this before on small battery powered electronic devices and it works very well, provided you have a ink eraser which fits the space. I have sometimes cut off a small piece of an ink eraser and glued in to the end of a pencil so it would fit the space. The reason for the ink type eraser is that it contains very fine grit (which the lead pencil eraser does not) which makes it act like sandpaper to abrade the surface corrosion to get to the base metal of the contacts. Do the same with the surfaces of the battery which will make contact as corrosion can happen on the battery as well. If after cleaning the contacts and the battery it still fails to light up, then you are SOOL.If it is the electro-mechanical, then the same applies for the contacts and the battery. In the EM type, the electronics are really a stepper motor controller, to drive a very tiny stepper motor which turns the gears in the mechanism just as a spring and escapement does in a wind-up model or most EM clocks which you hang on a wall. In this case, if after cleaning the terminal and battery it still fails to start, then there might be dust in the mechanism, much like sand in a bearing, preventing the motor from turning, or it could be the lubrication has dried out and gummed up the works. In this case, it is time to go to a jeweler who works on watches and get the mechanism cleaned in exactly the same manner as a typical wind-up watch would be cleaned to get the dust out of the works. I have Bulova Accutron, dating back to 1968. One day, it stopped working. I thought the battery dead and did the cleaning but it still failed to start. I ended up taking it to a Bulova jeweler and they cleaned it, lubricated it, and now it is STILL running as it did when I bought it. The Accutron uses a tuning fork driven by the electronics with a ratchet mechanism to turn the works in a similar manner as the stepper motor and in my case, it was dried out lubricants which gummed up the ratchet so the tuning fork still hummed, but the motion was not transmitted to the internals because the ratchet stopped working. My Accutron has great sentimental value for me, so the $75 I paid, was well worth it for me. You be the judge on how much you are willing to spend. By the way... My Accutron will be 40 years old this summer.

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even a stopped watch is right twice a day...

no. give it to a jeweler who has the right tools for this.