Ok I've taken about 2 hrs or maybe more to read through all the forums I can find to try to figure out if my baby is having issues the same as everyone else's. I can't pin it exactly down to one of those threads, so here goes (please if you know the answer you can toss in a link to the right forum).

Today: Driving down the road in the midst of some lovely rain caused by tropical storm FEY I stop at a red light (as one would normally). The dome light turned itself on!! I don't normally drive with the lights on with my car, not much night driving and sun is up when in the mornings so, I thought maybe the lights being on caused it. I played with closing the door, turning the lights on and off (and probably the guy ahead of me scratching his head). No dice. I turned off the dome light switch thinking - whatever, problem solved who needs a dome light?

I was at work not 10 minutes later, parked, lights off, working away and the alarm goes off. It is no longer raining at this point, I click the alarm off with my fob, scratched my head and turned to go into the office when it went off again. I keep my fob on top of my desk, so I'm not pressing any buttons when it is doing this. I click and I click with my fob, angrily at this point as that siren can drive you mad. Nothing - except loud siren noises and the flashing of lights - however, interestingly it flashes its lights at me while I tap the buttons as though to say "yea I know your pressing my buttons but I want to drive you insane anyway".

I finally walk over to the car, unlock the doors with the key and it shuts up for the rest of the day. I brought my cds into the office with me as ... well a car unlocked... well ok it's not yelling at me anyway.

My boss said, hey maybe your fob no longer has good batteries in it. Ok good point, 2005 model never replaced the fob batteriers, so sure that could be it. I go and get new batteries inthe fob, the guy at the store said "yup these are dead missy, don't know how it was working for ya" which it worked just fine until today, but again, whatever, if the shoe fits... $10 is nothing.

So I'm in the parkinglot. The key fob flashes the lights at me, but doesn't unlock/lock/alarm the car. The key in the door doesn't cause the ararm to go off, but if I put the key in the ignition, press the buttons twice and turn to ON i can happily lock/unlock the car whilst inside said car. As soon as I close the car door, it stays unlocked, and does not lock the drivers side door no matter how many times i press the buttons. (doesn't actually unlock the passenger/trunk doors either).

If I am inside the car the alarm button works (um OW). Not so outside the car.

So... what good does a key fob do me that only works inside the car? This is very silly but highly annoying.

I've read some articles indicating the battery could be a culprit, do you think this to be the case? A trip to Autozone to test it?? I mean that's the only thing I can think of unless there's some external sensor that actually picks up the fob magic to make it work??

FYI my spare key fob does the same thing, not working outside and works perfectly inside the car, never used the spare fob before, did not replace batteries.

Also just for fun because I know how easy it is to put batteries backwards, I disassembled my fob in my car to the dismay of my car (OW MY EARS!) and reseated the batteries correctly, did not fix the issue.

Aaaaarg!