[Orphanclone]

Good news and "eh" news:

I've got both the front and rear brake light switches working again. For the front, it turned out to be quite a bit of corrosion on the contacts, so some cleaner and a wire brush took care of that. As for the rear brake, I had forgotten that the prior owner was a midget. Not literally, but short enough that he had to move the position of the brake pedal extremely high. When I readjusted this, I neglected the rear brake light switch. It ended up being positioned so that the pedal itself couldn't physically engage the wire/switch, but when placed in proper position, the spring wasn't long enough to allow the switch to disengage. I'm guessing when the previous owner adjusted the pedal, he also put in a shorter spring because the necessary adjustment would have maxed out that of which the plastic threads on the switch are capable. One new (appropriately-sized) spring later and a few fine-tuning adjustments later, and it works like a champ.

And for the bad: before I started working on the brakes, I started the bike up, just to see how it would run. I'm not sure how to describe the sound, but had it been on a larger engine, I would say that one of the cylinders wasn't firing (or was misfiring). This would also reinforce the "bad gas" theory, but since I played around with the electrical so extensively, I drained the battery enough so it wouldn't start. As soon as I get charged up enough, I'd like to run the engine for a bit, just to listen to it, but I'm still probably going to have to drain the tank and put in some fresh gas at bare minimum.

Thanks for the advice so far!