Poor Keyboard backlight Macbook Pro 17"

Hello.
Just before August my Macbook Pro 17" (late 2009) keyboard seemed to behave correctly, it had the proper backlight intensity.
Now, after a month and a Lion OS X upgrade (upgraded before holidays), the intensity of the keyboard illumination has become poor, quite low.
It also has a kind of pink shade, compared to the new Macbook Air I purchased meanwhile.
It is just a normal downgrade due to the lifetime (I often use the Mac in low lights so the backlight is usually on), or it is just the result of a comaprison between new brighter keyboards (Macbook Air) and old ones (my Mackbook Pro 17")?
I tried restarting and resetting the SMC, but it did not fixed the problem.
Backlight is working normally, it just has become very weak.
Any way to restore the original intensity?
Thanks

In my efforts to troubleshoot this issue, I attempted to re-install Windows and the Boot Camp drivers - no luck; the keyboard did not light up during this 4th install of the Boot Camp drivers in windows.
As I read several posts about people upgrading to Mountain Lion or Mavericks and then losing their keyboard backlight, I also tried installing Snow Leopard. No luck there either.
As there is no indication that the SMC reset has been successfully performed, I searched for methods to do this through software, in the off-chance that the standard method was not working.
As per these instructions on the IFixIt forum, I set about to install rEFInd. However, the standard install method resulted in rEFInd never popping up in my boot menu, so I found another solution that involves renaming the rEFInd files folders to "boot", so the system boots to it directly. Instructions here.
As the rEFInd shell refuses start on this particular MacBook model, I also ended up copying the shell from tools folder of rEFIt iso download, and then copied it to the tools folder of the rEFInd installation. This worked great, and I could resume the instructions from the IFixIt forum.
(Note: in the rEFIt shell, ./ is not recognised, so you just type SmcFlasher.efi -reset 1)
However, even after successfully running the reset command, the keyboard backlight still doesn't light up.
I have been searching for ways to test the hardware itself, perhaps by applying power to the chord that connects to the logic board.
I found nothing on this though.

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