Radio install gone bad-help!

Hoping someone can shed some light on my no dash light problem. Car is a 92 960 Volvo. The factory radio (or amp) crapped out and I decided to put in an aftermarket unit. Of course I had to make my own harness to run speaker wires from the amp plug to bypass the amp but the radio works fine. I have a factory wiring diagram to help out. Only problem- now I have no dash or console lights. There are two wires from the Volvo radio harness- a white/yellow and a blk/brn that are marked as dash rheostat + and - according to the wiring diagram i have. Right now those two wires are taped off and NOT connected to each other or anything. I also assumed they were to allow the factory radio to dim w/ the rest of the lights. Aftermarket radio draws it lighting from the switched power wire I assume. so it lights up. Only thing I'm not sure of is if the dash/console lights were working BEFORE i put in the new radio. It's my wife's car and she hadn't driven at night for a few weeks so she couldn't tell me. I'm out of ideas.

Maybe related- the headlights on low beam will go off intermittently, sometimes they'll come back on after a minute or two. The headlight switch and dimmer are integrated. The headlight control relay has two electromagnetic deals with points. the high beams always work, but when you switch back to lows it's 50/50. I have the cover off the relay and usually a light tap will cause the low beam electromagnet to close the points and turn on the lights. I HATE these systems that only let the headlights work when the engine is running!

i would buy a new headlight switch and a new light control relay if i thought that would fix the problem... but I'm not sure it would. Both of these problems are ruining an otherwise excellent car!

I KNOW most of you guys are smarter than me...so, do you have any ideas?

Sounds like you got a bad connection when you were splicing... are the dash lights and the radio on the same circuit?

In reply to mndsm:

No, the radio works fine- dash lights have their own circuit and that fuse is good.

I'd be willing to be you accidentally knocked a wire off of something, or you accidentally grounded the dash light wire, blowing the fuse.

Check all the light connections, and the fuse(s).

After that, sounds like you'll be having some fun with a multimeter.

Oops, just saw your last post. Ignore my fuse comment.

Well, there's only about 10,000 wires under the dash where I was working, but I've checked that out pretty well and don't think I dislodged anything. I think I'm going to rob another 960 for a light switch and light control relay before I do any more checking...