The ceiling light/fan has been a royal pain for several days. There have been several bike trips to Home Hardware. Well it finally works.
The root problem A California law enacted about 20 years ago mandated that such fixtures have a safety mechanism to limit the usage to 75 watts. Over time it was determined that these limitation doo-hickeys might fail. Apparently ours did fail.
The California law has now been repealed in favour of other solutions. Our solution, as recommended by experts was simple: Lee ripped that sucker out of there and use a maximum of 50 watts.