Help Diagnose Electrical Gremlins

tyhuck · October 30, 2011

I was coming out of the deer lease last night and I noticed that the security light on the cluster was lit. Ive seen this light before, but it always goes off after a few seconds of startup. I turned the truck off and it went back to normal. Then, my courtesy lights on the doors cam on when I opend the door, and would not go off. I had to open and close the passenger door to get it to go off. Then, my high beam indicator would not turn off. The lights switched from high to low and back like normal, but the indicator stayed lit. Another restart of the engine, and it was back to normal. Finally, I stopped at the gas station and after filling up the truck would not start. It would crank, drop to an idle and die. I also noticed that none of the guage cluster needles would move. I tried a couple of times with repeate results, then I hit the gas while turning the key and it came to life. Drove the rest of the way home with no other issues. Checked everything again when I got home and none of the sysmtoms repeated.

Then I decided to go check some things out and it all went down hill from there. I removed my cluster to see if it hada bad connection, and then my 4wd switch stopped being lit and the DIC said "Service 4WD". Then the windows and door locks quit working. The windows only worked when the key was on, and the locks didnt work at all. I checked and double checked all the fuses. IM lost. Finally I unplugged my radio chime module and some of the stuff started working as far as I could tell. The only thing that didnt was the door locks. They are still intermittent.

Anyone know wht might be causeing this. Can a cheap door chime module for an aftermarket stero really cause all that trouble???

Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this???