I am not getting any lights on the selection panel!

I had the problem where there would be two dimly light bars on the LCD display and nothing would happen when you hit any of the buttons. I could hit it with a hair dryer and it would start to work again temporarily. Eventually it stopped working all together. I pulled the board and tested all the switches thinking there may be moister causing them to fail. Switches all tested fine. I also tested the regular diodes and they tested fine. Then I started testing the LEDs and found one that showed conductivity where all the others showed none. This was with the board removed and no power applied. I pulled the LED and everything had been working.

Hello all.
I thought I would spend some time to post this because I have received help from others and their tips. The hair dryer method worked for me too with surprise. So I needed to find out why. In my case, when I used the hair dryer at the front control panel, the dryer would start. But then, after a few minutes, it would not start again. I found out that the LEDs are causing this issue. The diodes were failing. They are basically diodes. But they were internally shorting out. I just shorted the terminals of the LEDs and saw that the intermittent failures became more certain. So, I decided to clip off the faulty LED and the dryer has been working greater ever since. My assumption is that the heat from the hair dryer temporarily increases the internal resistance of the LEDs. Once the LED that is failing cools, the problem occurs again. This would physically make sense. I saw another post about the small switches failing and moisture on the back of the circuit board, but I don't think so. Moisture is not the issue. The switches are not the issue. If you go through and short out one LED at a time, you will be able to replicate the numeric display showing a "11" or another number. Try it. Then once you know which LED is causing the problem, just wiggle it enough so that the leads break off. You won't have the indication by the LED light anymore, but it sure beats paying $350 for the part. Or about $500 for sears to fix it. Haha.

A couple years ago my dryer panel was completely dead - no lights, no response from any buttons. I broke out the hair dryer, and it worked perfectly until this weekend, when the same thing happened. The hair dryer seemed to work at first but then it started having other intermittent problems and even when it did work I got the cycling/beeping of the signal volume as seen in the video.

I was ready to give up and buy a new (non-Kenmore!) dryer but then I saw the video and thought I'd give it one more shot. I took the boards out but didn't have any contact cleaner so I sprayed everything down (buttons and connectors) with WD-40. However, I think the real problem this time was that one of the ribbon connectors wasn't making a good connection - it was the smaller connector, on the board that runs down the left side of the dryer. Using the diag mode I could see that when I put backwards pressure on the connector, all of the LEDs would light up properly, otherwise they were intermittent. So, I made some shims out of the end of a wire tie, and just kind of jammed them between the connector and the socket so the connector made better contact with the pins. It seems fine now - I can wiggle the cable to my heart's content and all the lights stay on solid and all of the buttons work. Hopefully it holds up; if it fails again I'll probably cut off the connectors and just solder them directly to the board.