04 Jetta electrical issues

Hello, I'd like to apologize in advance for my first post being a problem with my car post. I've always been able to find problems with Bing and searching the archives of this site.

Yesterday the family wanted to go out for lunch and bowling. We jump in the car, I noticed my clock had gone forward in time by 1 hours and 20ish minutes. I didn't think much of it and set the clock as we headed down the road. Drove about 30 minutes, stopped the car cracked the windows and shut it off. Came back out after about 3 hours. Started the car, no odometer, trip meter, clock or speedo. Tach and all idiot lights came on and funtion on the cluster, Radio went into "safe" mode and displayed 1000. I turned on the headlamps and none of the backlighting was working either. I tried my wives key thinking my key transponder had gone bad. Same issue. Decided to drive it home, about 2 mile's down the road the speedo came back. Another 5-8 miles the trip, Odometer and clock came back, but the clock was counting the hours up like I was trying to set the clock.

Got home, shut it down. Looked for anything obvious, no coolant in the engine harness or cluster harness. Disconnected the battery for a few minutes. Hooked it back up, radio came back to life but hour meter was still counting up. Also the Radio went back to all of the pervious owners pre-sets? Checked at power and grounds that I know of with no change in the problem. Removed the cluster, found the hour set micro switch was shorted. I removed it from the printed circuit board. Hooked everything back up everything works as it should now, besides I obviously cannot set the hours.

Now I know I found/kinda fixed the hour meter thing. I just don't know why it had all the other issues, that a simple power cycle fixed. I was also thinking it was possibly a poor connection at the cluster harnesses that I accidently fixed by removing and hooking the two bail connectors back up? From looking at the schematics it appears the cluster is in charge of putting car in valet mode and theft.

Please note, it's very hot where I live and it seemed stuff started to come back to life as the a/c cooled the cabin. Sorry for the novel, just trying to give the most accurate description of what all was going on.

They can be a bit weird sometimes and there's so many things all connected like the clock probably uses the same power source as other components in the cluster so they all got affected. Maybe the power cycle cleared some electrical build up or that.

I've heard of disconnecting the battery cure a number of random things with the vags so it doesn't surprise me at all

I appreciate the response. Sorry for myignorance, but what is the "vags"?

Another thing I forgot to mention, a few weeks ago we went to the lake, Sat in the sun and heat soaked for about 3-4 hours. When we left the clock was doing the hour count up thing, nothing else like this last time though, all systems are on line.

I grabbed some dielectric grease from work and I'm going to put some on all the connectors I can get my dirty mitts on.

VAG, the company that builds the golf, VW are part of the VAG group. It covers audi, seat, vw, skoda etc

Interesting.... mine jumped a couple of hours 2 weekends ago while I was changing out a radiator fan. Didn't disconnect anything under the hood (other than the fan obviously). I've been keeping an eye on it to see if it happens again.

Well day 4. I've tried to duplicate it every day by letting it heat soak for a few hours and starting it up. Nothing so far. I dint know if I accidentally fixed it or it was just a random glitch in thematrix. I'll post back up if it happens again and or I actually find what I did to "fix" it.

At any rate thanks for the replys.