I had this problem also, but I didn't write it to bug reports as I found a way around it. Anyway:
I had a two-story house. My living room downstairs had stairs to go up and from there I placed another set of stairs to the roof. After that I noticed that my living room lamps stopped working. After cursing and hitting my head to my table trying to figure out what was going on I decided to try and remove every piece of furniture from the room to see if there was somthing taht would cause it. And after I moved the stairs out lights popped on again! WTH?!
After fiddling around I found out that the upstairs stairs to roof were the cause... They didn't go into a room yet, just to the roof. So somehow the game had decided that because there was a hole in my second floor's roof, the DOWNSTAIRS lights should stay out x______x
I've also had multiple problems in that house (MAXIS built house in the University neighborhood, the one which had no sims living there yet) with rooms not being recognized as rooms and sometimes not being able to place objects, change wallpapers or demolishing walls ("Object affected by this action cannot be moved into household inventory" or something like that) without restarting the game.
I tried your solution out and it DID actually end up being the roof for me, thank you!!!
