Hello there,

Thank you for accepting me into this forum. First I'd like to apologize for the rather lengthy post and for possible mistakes in my language.
I'm from Germany and I own an E34 518i sedan from 4/1995 that I indeed love very much. But recently the car has been troubling me. I'm having serious electric failures.

The problems are as following: No crank when turning the key, no power windows, no sunroof, no central locking, no radio, no interior lights, no wipers at all (not even the highest setting).
The car starts when you push it downhill and when you bypass the starter in the big wiring loom right below the windshield.

I did a lot of research on the internet, including this forum in particular and found some threads that described the same problems.
This is the link to the thread that appeared to be most promising: (http://www.bimmernut.com/forum/archi...p/t-44670.html).

However, none of the solutions that were offered in this thread (and all others on the internet) have worked for me. I'll now give a short recap of what I found and what I tried:

All fuses in the engine bay are ok. The fusible link next to the battery in the engine bay appears to have no hairline cracks. I found that my carpet on the left hand side of the car was very, very wet. Water was also beneath the left rear seat where the rear-power-distribution-box sits. This must be somehow related to my problems.
I checked all fuses at this location and they are also ok.
I removed the seats and the carpet to dry them. I then followed the instructions from the thread that I found on this forum and opened the wiring loom that sits beneath the rear carpet on the left side close to the rear seat. There were many corroded connections which I soldered back together. This brought the interior lights and the radio back to life. All other systems stayed dead. I removed the relay-module and the general-module and the three relays from the rear-power-distribution-box and dried them over night with dry beads. No effect.
I then concluded that my failures must stem from a broken general module. I bought a used GM and a used RM from ebay with the correct part numbers. (GM = 61358368571 / RM = 31351379741).
Today I tried to install them which brought no change at all.
I then removed the GM out of curiousity and suddenly the engine fired right up when turning the key. Naturally, all other systems didn't work.

I feel like I'm in a dead end now. Why does the engine suddenly start properly without the GM? Is it possible that the GM interferes with my anti-theft-module? (I should have the EWS II). I tried finding the EWSII but had no success. Is there maybe a way to bypass it? (Not trying to steal a car or do anything illegal).
Does anyone have an idea which other wires I should check?

A bing thank you in advance to everyone who has an Idea how to help me.

Regards from Germany!