All right, I got it fixed. Here's what I did.
I figured maybe there was a problem in the instrument panel with a trace or something like that, so I pulled the instrument panel out to take a look. I applied 12 volts across everything and it worked fine. All the traces are exposed on the back of the board so I check them all carefully and didn't see anything wrong.
I then figured that since the board was so simple, it must be elsewhere. I went and got the dimmer switch and checked the resistance with an ohm meter. It varied nicely from 0 ohms to around .2 ohms or so( maybe it was .02 ohms, I don't remember but it was very small). I then got a hair dryer and added some heat to the dimmer switch. When I rechecked the resistance, it flopped around alot and never went less than .2 ohms ( or .02 ). In fact, when it should have been 0 ohms, it was .4 ohms (.04?). Anyway, if .2 is very very dim, you can see that .4 would be even less and appear to be off.
I bought a new dimmer switch and installed it tonight. It now appears to work just fine now. Time will tell for sure.
Ed
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