Hello I own a 1997 Bonneville SSEi and the previous owner installed a Viper 791x Alarm system in it. Here is a page that has its layout (i think) :

http://www.lxforums.com/board/showthread.php?t=33257

Anyways recently I have a huge problem with it. My car no longer starts at all and I believe it has something to do with this security system. I will explain:

About a month ago the car would randomly go apeshit and start flashing the alarm off when there was clearly nothing hitting it etc. Sometimes it would show the hood being opened when I was just a few yards away lol. The hood was not being tampered with obviously. I thought nothing of these small headaches and went on.

With the past two weeks though my battery has randomly been drained about four times without warning. I did some tests and confirmed the battery was shot (was leaking acid too). I bought a new battery, plopped it in the car and she started right up. The volts were good.

I drove to the bank and shut the car off. When i got back out and tryed to start it, it was dead already! I called my mother down to try and boost the car and it would not turn over, or make any noises of it trying to ( the er..er...er.. er. noise lol). So i got it towed home and started down ground tests etc on my battery cables. During that i snapped off the copper on the solinode. I was pissed and went out and bought another one put on. I tested to start it again ( might have burned the solinode out when boosting) and it was still dead although all the lights and radio worked.

Finally me and my uncle started testing the starter wire going to the ignition and traced the problem to no power going to the solinode. Then we traced what portion of the wire was getting no juice while pushing the key to the starting position. The area seems to be between the ignition and group of wires coming out of the firewall ( the big harness under the plastic fuse cover ).

So I ran a new line from splicing into that right to the ignition wire under the rack somewhere. The car started but died everytime after 3 seconds of trying again. Therefore after all of that bullshit I think it is the alarm causing my headache and i am no good at electrical. I was wondering how i could test the alarm for short and /or how to diasable it all together. Its very frustrating right now.

thanks for reading.

ps. if u need pictures of wat i done i could take some.

your Viper might need a new brain.

they tend to fizz out once and a while

And there is no way to " go around it" / bypass it? It is an absolute spaghetti factory under there and I have not a clue what to do to start getting it out of there.

IMO unless you are trained to install I wouldnt mess with it

i found out the problem, there is a bad wire coming from the iginition wire out of the key. Had a friend over and we screwed with it for awhile and just thought to try the remote start. It fired right up. After that it started everytime with the key. The bad wire must have gotten a good enough arc to melt it lol...

So now I gotta tear the damn column apart someday. For now the remote will have to do.