July 15th, 2010 
David 
Jasel125 asked:
The 1998 Jetta I own recently have a electrical malfunction. The brake light will come on when I first started the car, even without my emergency brake on. It will cause my head lights, windshield wipers to malfunction. Sometimes I can fix it by turning the iginiton switch all the way forward, I am wondering if that's an electrical malfuncting or ignition system malfuncting.
The 1998 Jetta I own recently have a electrical malfunction. The brake light will come on when I first started the car, even without my emergency brake on. It will cause my head lights, windshield wipers to malfunction. Sometimes I can fix it by turning the iginiton switch all the way forward, I am wondering if that's an electrical malfuncting or ignition system malfuncting.
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elec in the fuse box
This is a common problem with 98 mk3s, but it seems that the only solution is too disable the day time running lamps (dtrl).
This is what im betting your symptoms are (further detail)
#1.When you first start the car, and the ebrake light comes on, its fully illuminated, but when you release the ebrake, the light still stays on, but its dim.
#2. The next time this happens, try turning on the brights. Im going to bet the ebrake light shuts off completely, and your windsheild wipers will start to work (the wipers might not work, ive heard of them working more then ive heard of them not working after doing this)..if that makes sense..
So to disable the dtrl, you need to do some pretty significant modifications:
there are countless posts on this at
heres the first one i read: