This one's weird... The driver door when opened, does not activate the courtesy lights, but DOES activate the dome light. The front passenger door does not activate any lights at all, however, I changed the switches and the problem is exactly the same. It gets even stranger-- when the rear doors are opened, the courtesy lights (on the front doors) work fine! Before this, lights used to flicker and rear door switches were flakey, until front passenger stopped functioning entirely, that seemed to make the rear doors work properly. As a side note, my keyless entry stopped functioning some time back (related???). This is regarding a 1999 Infiniti I30t, but I figured the 4th gen forum has more traffic and the electrical system is identical. Any help here would be appreciated!

 

I've seen these kind of problems occur with bad grounds, moisture and ghosts. I tended to believe in the ghosts! If the lights aren't independently powered (and the way they wire things now...) you might be getting backfeed power from somewhere. It could come from the interior switch or another wire. The only thing I can think of is to pull fuses and try the lights to see if you can find out where they're being cross or backfed from. I hate electrical problems!

P.S. An exorcism might help!

 

I'll poke around a bit more. My instinct is telling me it's a broken wire but I don't even know where to begin checking! The exorcism sounds reasonable... any one else have any theories? Anyone else have the keyless entry stop working and manage to fix it? That's another one that's pretty annoying...

 

Your door switchs all connect to the BCM, when the BCM senses that a door is open it sends a signal to the driver and passenger door control modules, they each turn on their step lamps. Check connections from the drivers door switch to the BCM. This problem may be hard to fix but that's where I would start.

Could be a BCM / remote issue. Try resetting your remote there are posts on how to do that.

 

The courtesy lights in the front doors are controlled by the window switch actually. If that isnt functioning properly for whatever reason....it'll cause the issues you're having.

 

I'll check the connections all around. Everything else (windows, power locks, mirrors, whatever...) works fine. I've already tried reprogramming the remotes many times, so the keyless entry issue is something deeper. It makes sense to me that these issues may be related.

 

have you ran the keyless system diagnostic?