Delayed dome light illumination.

I have an interesting situation with my dome light on my 360 coupe that I am wondering if anybody else has seen. The first symptom is that the light does not illuminate immediately when the door opens but is delayed from a few seconds to almost a minute before it turns on. The second symptom is a delay in button reaction. I will push one of the buttons on the light and a delay (sometimes long sometimes short) will take place before the light turns on or off. It seems that there is a large amount of electrical resistance somewhere. I can't image this is a good thing and I need to probably get it fixed. Has anybody seen this before or has any idea how to dig deeper to figure out what is wrong?

 

Thanks for the input. Lamps are standard. On door open the light comes on when it wants to. And lamp button push the light comes on when it wants to. I am not sure what a spotlight is.

 

Thanks for the clarification, I just assumed the whole unit was the dome light. Yes both the dome light and spotlight behave similarly when activated via the button.

 

I have never taken the cigarette lighter out and have no idea what kind of condition it is in. I should probably look at that. Also I don't have anything plugged into the obd2 port. I think I might have to check out that ground as a winter project. I am starting to dig into this because I am starting to notice alot of subtle electrical issues that for the past 3 years I just chalked up to paranoia (I drive the car rarely, like once a month). For example I took a drive yesterday where I noticed that the clock was reset as well as the radio (I had to reenter the radio number) and I had not used the trunk power off switch in over a year. This has happened periodically since I have owned the car even though I have the battery on a tender and the battery is a newer (2 years old) interstate battery. This mixed with the strange light behavior has to be something bigger. On top of that my turn signal dash light burned out earlier in the year. I hoped it was the signal relay and I replaced it with a scuding relay but it didn't fix the problem. Because the relay was not the problem I reinstalled the old one (which looked like brand new from a soldering standpoint.)

 

The car is not near me at the moment and I am going to have to verify that both doors behave in the same way. I think I should figure out if the results are seen with both engine off and engine running. I will try to get that data by next week.

 

I was finally able to get in the car last weekend. Of course all of the light problems I had described above were not present this time around. I did perform a ctek battery reconditioning last month so I wonder if the problem was from a weak battery. I will keep an eye out for the reemergence of the problem.