This sure sounds familiar....
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/x-files-question#post-305566
Go to post #23 for the things I did to fix it.
(Topic ID: 107426)
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X Files, The
Sega, 1997
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Keep playing. Things like this - most of the time - don't just work themselves out. There was a reason it was doing it - most frequently the problem has to do with the optos directly in front of the filing cabinet.
More than likely, it is just the optos are a bit out of whack and the beam does not cleanly project from the transmitter to the receiver after a while. It could also just be that the transmitter needs some Windex applied to it via a Q-Tip to clean it.
But hey, if it is "up and gone", man, thank your stars and play on 
!
Wow, that first pic looks rough. It looks like someone's been in there with a soldering iron. Is all that grey soldering from someone before you??
Quoted from Stal8080:That is what I thought too....had an engineer at work resolder everything for me and clean that up. Low and behold no more phantom cabinet hits!!! However my machine is set on Freeplay with 5 balls. From what I remember when I played Pinball at the arcades it was always 3 ball which I need to figure out how to set the Freeplay back to. The only thing I found odd was that after a few ball outs the cabinet will lower and the DMD will say "MULTI-BALL READY". However when multiball triggers or when trying to trigger multiball the game has not register one phantom cabinet hit since board was resolder....fingers crossed!
That is the game feeling sorry for you. It is like Bram Stokers Dracula. On the 3rd ball, multi ball is ready.
Free play is somewhere in the options menu. Without being ther3, it is tough to recall how to navigate to it, but rest assured, it is an option.
2 months later
Quoted from Stal8080:I was re reading over your initial thread in regards to your X Files issues. I'm abit confused when you started installing leds....it seems initially that that may have triggered the phantom cabinet hits because when you removed a few it corrected itself??? However later after consulting with a few fellow pinside you thought it was misaligned optos ie post 23 in original thread?
I know my machine was modded with LEDs so I'm wondering if that was issue??? Just really want this fixed slightly frustrated because this game is like center piece of game room.....I know part of the hobby
XF was a very tricky beast. It was the one, and only one, Sega I ever owned, and I'll be honest - XF made me swear off Segas. It was the Ferrari of my pinball collection by a mile.
When I installed those LEDs, I was brand spanking new to this hobby. I am coming up on my 3 year mark (read: still a n00b, just have a small amount of knowledge now), so if I did something and ALL OF A SUDDEN something was malfunctioning, I quickly inferred it was due to my action (in this case, installing LEDs).
I have heard and read that installing LEDs near optos can make optos register false positives - in this case - the phantom file cabinet hits. My advice, pull ALL LEDs near the optos or just pull them ALL out and see if the bad behavior stops. If not, it could be possible that the optos are not 100% aligned to each other. Put your game in switch test, and take your open hand and swat the playfield good and hard in random places - see if doing that causes the opto switch to trigger on the switch test screen. If it does, that means the vibrations are causing the optos to be slightly out of alignment for a very small period of time - meaning the optos are NOT in alignment or are off enough to cause random file cabinet reactions.
I swear, this game made me fear optos so much. When I found out they were in BSD, I almost lost my lunch. I was terrified of them after XF. After working with them more and more, I am learning they are not so bad; XF just didn't utilize them very well or the design was bad or something....
Now that you are utilizing the switch matrix in your photos there, have you done this?
Quoted from NPO:...take your open hand and swat the playfield good and hard in random places - see if doing that causes the opto switch to trigger on the switch test screen. If it does, that means the vibrations are causing the optos to be slightly out of alignment for a very small period of time - meaning the optos are NOT in alignment or are off enough to cause random file cabinet reactions.
...
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