After 2 weekends of trying to troubleshoot a drivers window that would not raise, I seem to have at least temporarily beaten the gremlins out of it, as I went from no action to no glitches for the past week.+

The symptoms were the clicking of the relays when I attempted to raise the window.

I performed extensive searches using every batch of keywords I could think of, including "Who played Lumpy on Leave it to Beaver?" and came up with the following courses of action.

1) Checked wiring in door and also in the rubber accordian seal. The silver wires were exposed significantly on either side of the connector. I pulled the insulation back down but did not seal them as suggested by some.
2) Replaced the regulator/motor assembly as it seemed like the most likely candidate based on the results of my searches. There was no change in outcome so I immediately took it out and reinstalled the original.
3) Plugged into a new door module long enough to determine that this also caused no change. This was an expensive experiment, made more so by the fact that I purchased at the dealer. In retrospect, this was probably a amateur move plugging into this, but felt I was running out of options. Also, the fact that this was a inventory item for the dealer, where the switch for instance wasn't, seemed to lend some credibility to the idea that this was a failure part. The results of my search also seemed to suggest that it was. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you.
4) I got no results regarding who played Lumpy.

As previously stated, the window seems to be reliably working now, but that could change the next time I hit the up switch.

The module and the regulator assy have been posted up in the For Sale section under "Driver door module and regulator/motor assy". I tried to think of something really attention grabbing but came up with nothing.

 

Frank Bank played Clarence 'Lumpy' Rutherford on Leave It To Beaver.

Now for the bad news. You could have save a bunch of money on that module. All you had to do was swap the driver's door control module side with the passenger side. That would have told you if the problem was in the module or not.

Next time your window fails to operate, turn the key on and hold the window up/down button and slam the door closed hard several times. The armature gets stuck in the motor and slamming the door frees it up most of the time.

 

C5at57

Thanks for the response. I did read that the passenger side could be used, but I was up against some schedule constraints and elected not to pull the passenger door off to check it out. Long story short, there were a lot of moving pieces in this deal and I made a bad decision out of a sense of pressure to resolve and frustration over my efforts.

I beat the door like a circus monkey with the existing regulator assy and the new regulator assy and there was not a consistent positive outcome in either scenario.

My initial thoughts based on what I was seeing when it started acting up was that the switch was getting hinkey, but I let several talk me out of that belief and did not see it addressed in any of the writeups on the forum. Are you aware of any switch failures?

Oh well - in the past 20 years of maintaining my cars (C4's, C5, two 7 Series BMW, and an M3) this is the first real FUBAR I have gotten into. So if I offset the cost of the module, even if I am unable to sell it at any price, against all of the money I refused to spend for anything I could remotely handle, it all seems to work out ok. At least that is how I have started thinking about it after I beat myself up for making a rash decision.

FYI - in almost 15 years that I have been wearing out that lame "Who played Lumpy...?" shtick you are the first to provide a response, let alone the correct response.

Thanks again.

 

My symptoms were similar....
my problem was the female connector pins had spread.....
I squeezed them together again and life has been good for about 2 months

Thanks to Bill Curlee for the advise and guidance