I'm having this problem in my '88 right now.
If I watch the tach when this happens, it instantly drops to zero as if
the power has been cut.
Usually, but not always, pushing the gas pedal to the floor will cause
it to "snap out" of the power cut behavior after a few second lag.

Todd
'88 Vanagon

Peter Igo wrote:

>Dear fellow Vanagon owners,
>
>   Have you ever replace your heads??!!  I wanted to
>know what your symptoms were before you replaced
>them???  Were you simply having some coolant leak off
>the engine??  was your coolant resevoir low??  Or were
>you having "missing" problems?? or power failure??
>    My symptom is that the engine is "missing"
>intermittantly. I can drive it for 30 min and it may
>not "miss" once, but then I might just drive around
>the block and it might "miss" once or twenty times.
>    I want to make sure I am using the correct
>termonology here: when i say "missing" I mean that I
>will be driving my '87 VW vanagon Syncro along, at any
>speed, everything is going smoothly, and then there is
>an instantaneous loss of power, just for about a
>quarter of a second. The whole van "shutters" for an
>instant, then its back to driving smoothly, except
>that this effect may happen repeatedly.  And I think
>if I put in the clutch and look at the guage, that the
>rpm's drop way down almost to nothing when it
>"misses".  It may be at that point that the only thing
>that keeps the van going is its momentum, which
>essentially "roll starts" the engine back on again??
>
>