[V6-12v] Lost a whole bunch of electrics?

[Roger M. Woodbury]

I vote for the ignition switch, too.

>From the earliest time that we owned my wife's '94 100CS Quattro Avant, on
rare occasion, after engine start the car would run happily down the street
without a whole bunch of accessories and other electrical systems working.

Recently...a week or so ago...my wife arrived home and announced to me that
the headlights and directional signals would not work in the car.  Not only
that, she proclaimed that the sunroof wouldn't close either.

It was dark at that point, and I went out to her car and started the engine.
The lights worked, the directionals worked, the sunroof worked...EVERYTHING
worked.  I came into the house and pronounced that everything was "all
fixed".  

"What was wrong," she asked.  I merely held my up my hand, twisting it as
though holding an ignition key, and said, "it's merely in the magic of the
Master's wrist."  I won't print her response.  She has ZERO mechanical
aptitude, and ANYTIME I can tease her about it is good:  

The problem with the car is that the ignition key doesn't completely return
to the neutral position on occasion.  This results, I guess, in the
interruption of power to where it needs to go, perhaps the load reduction
relay.

The next morning I decided to explore a bit further. I took a can of WD40
and applied some to my wife's ignition key and tried the ignition lock
several times.  Emboldened, I decided to be a tad more aggressive, and I
sprayed a little WD40 directly into the ignition lock using the spray tube
on the can.  To date, NO recurrence, and the entire ignition lock seems to
work much better.

This car has 102,000 miles, the last sixty four of which we put on the car.

Try a little WD40 before you yank out relays and spend money.  

Roger