You lost a ground wire somewhere. Common occurrence of some
front-engined cars.  Lose a chassis ground and the throttle cable
becomes the wire carrying lots of current when you go to start it.
Makes it hard to get it to idle.....

Jim

On Sunday, Jul 18, 2004, at 16:09 America/Vancouver, Steve Russell
wrote:

> This is really weird. My wife and I just got back from a trip in the
> van and part way through something started smoking out of the dash
> while we were driving. I pulled over and the only thing that seemed to
> be on were the lights (but now that I think about it maybe the fan as
> well) Anyway, I turned off the lights and the smoke went away. We
> drove the rest of the trip using the driving lights (independent
> circuit) and since back, I've taken out the instrument cluster and am
> in the process of getting the dash out. When I looked inside, the
> cable housing on the two lower controls on the heater control were
> melted and now hardened so they don't operate anymore. There's no
> power here is there, it's just a cable. What could cause this? Anybody
> ever experience this? Any insight greatly appreciated.