OK, I'm gonna try to leave some helpful hints for people.
Our cruise is working, but initiation seems a bit sporadic. I think it's in the stalk on the steering wheel because it seems like I've got to jiggle that a bit to get cruise to lock in.
It took me a few hours to stumble on to an obvious trouble-shooting trick. Swap with known good parts. The cruise button (lower left corner of dash) seemed to be inoperative because neither light was working. The obvious thing to do is borrow bulbs from the two buttons next to the cruise button. I screwed around for an hour or more trying to figure out if the bulbs were functional. When I FINALLY thought of swapping bulbs it all became clear. The bulbs that were in the cruise button failed to light up when swapped to the rear window defrost (RWD) button. The lights from the RWD button worked in the cruise button.
Before swapping bulbs I sat down and mapped out the contacts in the back of the cruise button with a multimeter. There are 6 contacts at the back of the cruise button. 4 of them are for the lightbulbs. The last two contacts make up when the button is pushed. So there's less going on than you might think when you look in there and see 6 contacts. Mapping out the contacts and what they do was fine for my own education, but swapping bulbs was a much faster way to get an idea that the button was 1) getting power and 2) probably functioning just fine.
I took a multimeter to the contacts in the plug that the cruise button plugs into. With the key "on" a contact at the top of the plug went hot. With the lights turned on, another contact showed 12V. So I guessed that power was OK into and thru the plug. After mapping out the contacts in the back of the button, and swapping the tiny light bulbs, it sure seemed like everything was OK up to and thru the button.
It was rough getting to the brake switch on the brake pedal. I took that plastic shroud under the steering wheel off before attempting to reach the switch. I removed it and tested it with a multimeter. One pair of contacts was open until pushing the plunger in. The other set of contacts were closed until pushing the plunger in. Although I didn't know for sure what that meant, the brake switch seemed to be functional.
Took it out for a test. At first the cruise didn't engage. Then it did. As mentioned previously, it seemed like I had to wiggle the stalk a little bit, or push down on it a little, to get cruise to engage. But it is working right now. If it gets worse I'll replace the stalk on the steering wheel.
EDIT: soobcrazy, when you say "find the manual" do you mean the manuals are available online? The real true hardcopy manuals are so expensive, and it seems like you've gotta order them from the dealer. Having said that, it sure would have been handy to have a set of steps for troubleshooting. Depending of course on how useful the manual's troubleshooting steps are...
