NS car people I need your help, weird electrical problem.

I am a mechanic for a living and i deal with this kind of stuff on a regular basis. What make and model of the car. You will need to inspect for broken wire insulation in common places like underneath the dashboard where your feet rest because its sounds like a short ( copper to copper) to me. The first thing i would do is get a multimeter and measure the impedence of the wires going to the various switches that are having trouble working. If you have high resistence, you know there is a short/break/corrision on the wires. For a guy like you with no experience first thing you should do is check for visible damage to wiring underneath the dashboard/ on the joints in the doors that feed wires into the door locks and window motors ( normally all you have to do is pull back the rubber accordian looking cover and you will find the wiring harness). Those are normall the 2 main areas i would check first. Another common area is underneath the carpet in your car, but that is a little more work as the other 2 checks can be done in 3 minutes.

It's a 97 camry LE 4 cyl

I'll take a look under there, and I do have a multimeter so I can test the wires.

I didn't see any frayed or broken wires and the harnesses look ok. I pulled back the little piece of trim down by the floor on the left and all the wires looked fine there too.

when using your meter make sure you find a good common ground and dont damage the wires/connectors when probing with the meter. If you have alligator clips with your meter, use those and a pin to probe into the connectors. Set it to the omega symbol, and normally if you have anything larger than a couple ohms of resistence there is a problem. Like I was saying, common sense is that wires hardly ever just "fail" and the most likely cause of the wiring issue is there is a pinch in a high wearing area like a door joint, where water can build up or where your feet rest. Another route you can go with your meter is turning on the ignition on checking to see if there is power to all the switches being 12-14volts, anything less than that normally means some sort of resistence/ corrosion is robing the circuit before the switch. Other than the basic checks, its going to be very hard to find out the issue without proper wiring diagrams and having the knowledge to test relays, so hopefully its something nice and easy to spot.

Yeah I figured I'm kinda fucked without a diagram, I'm just testing random connections unless i have one.

I can pull wiring diagrams for porsche/vw/audi only so I cant really help you. To me it sounds like a wiring harness is wearing at a point somewhere. It can be a nightmare figuring out where that is happening though. If you feel confident enough in your ability take apart the steering column covers and start testing wires in that area or go closer to the fire wall. If you think logically, most likely the door latch wiring ( the dinging noise you hear) is not part of the steering column so it may be a damaged area before the steering column. The next step i would take is pulling the deadpedal off and inspecting for wear in that area or perhaps the lower door trim where you enter the car. Maybe just scope out the wiring harness if you can see where it enters the car at the firewall. The damage you see on the wires will be hard to spot unless you pay attention. It may not even be breaks in the wires, it could be small green flaky shit caused by corroding copper. Keep in mind alot of car companies ran the wiring harnesses underneath the car carpet and sometimes they rest right in high traffic areas and get beat up over time. Good luck man.

wanna get me one for an 85' 4000s?

what do you need in specific. The wiring diagram for vw/audi is next to impossible to read for someone who has not had factory training.

lol my first thought was VW to haha