[plnyyanks]

It's possible that some of the itnernal circuitry of the sidecar could have shorted out. We messed up one of ours because aluminum shavings had gotten in between two DIO ports (convienently between power and ground), shorting out our robot. After a lot of testing, we determined that only parts of the sidecar had shorted out (specifically, only some of the DIOs were broken, and the rest worked fine).

What I'm saying is if you are using the same sidecar as before, when your photosensors were shorting out the 5V slots, some of the circuitry has been fried, rendering only parts of the sidecar useless.