Alright, so I ordered a very nice Xentech HID kit from a vendor on ebay, and installed it with little fuss. Everything is straightforward and makes perfect sense... Existing headlight harness to ballast, and ballast to xenon bulb. I know for a fact I hooked it up properly because the bulbs lit up just fine on the driver and passenger side for a time.

The problem is that I somehow managed to fry my headlight switch with this simple installation and no one on the R170 SLK forum where I checked first seems to have had anywhere near the same issue, nor do I see anything here quite like it. After the lights were in and running for about 10 minutes, the combo headlight switch/fuse box (what a stupid design) began to fizzle and crackle. Once this occurred, the fog lights began to come on without needing to pull out the switch. Then things wouldn't turn completely off anymore (parking lamps would stay on, or the fogs would stay on for some time after the main lamps were turned off). It got to the point where I had to pull the fuses for the parking lights and fogs and even THAT didn't keep the right side parking indicators from turning off completely.

ALRIGHT, fast forward to now and I have a new (aftermarket) switch installed. I'm both afraid to try this again yet also not willing to give up just yet because I MUST have HIDs in the CF. The way the headlights are designed it almost begs for them.

The *ONLY* possible mistake I may have made initially was not using the relays included with the kit. The instructions weren't clear on whether these plain black boxes even needed to be used so I didn't, and I figured that those would be used if you went to a FULL separate wiring harness. I did notice that when I plugged these relays into the chain, that the driver side HID didn't come on. However by this point I was worried things would get worse and didn't experiment anymore, so it's possible the broken switch was the culprit.

So my question is, has anyone ever experienced this issue and is it possible that the not using relays was the ENTIRE cause of the problem? I have to get this working.

TIA.