Power Window Woes

I’ve got a '92 Taurus SHO with “power” windows. Over the course of a couple of years, they started to get balky. Now, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. And when they do work, they work sometimes only with the driver’s switches and sometimes only with the individual switches at each door. I’ve sprayed the switches with circuit cleaner, as one book suggested, but found no discrenible joy. Any ideas? Makes no sense that they would work intermittently, no? Either they’re broken or they’re not? Do I have a poltergeist?

You’ll have to go through and chk your connections. I’d start w/ the main power and main ground for the circuit. Go to the library and get an electrical diagram for the circuit.

One place to check is where the wires from the body to the doors run. If you open the doors and look in the hinge areas you find a flexible rubber boots. It’s inside these boots where the wires run.

Over time with constant opening and closing of the doors, the wires inside these boots begin fray and break from being flexed. This can cause intermintent connections where the windows sometimes work and sometimes don’t work.

Tester

It could be the wires, as Tester suggests, or the regulators. Pry out the switch panel when it doesn’t work and see if you measure current at the switch. Make sure the windows don’t work after you pry the switch panel out of the door. If they do, shorted wires look like the culprit. If you have power and the windows don’t move, replace the regulator. You might as well replace the motor at the same time. You can buy them as a set on eBay for around $70 delivered.