It is an odd issue that's for sure. Definitely not what I was expecting. The way I discovered it was by wiggling wires at the radio to see if any would have effect getting power to the Navi unit. I thought maybe there was a break in a wire at the radio. Just wiggling the connector caused the radio to go on.
This was repeatable and isolated to the inner wire not making contact with the connector as mentioned in the fix above.
I'm just glad it worked and so is the wife. It's her car, I'm just the fixer.
