The rich running condition that I have been  struggling with has been
fixed. The problem ended up being a short in the wire  to the grounding sheath on
the wire from the O2 sensor to the computer. I should  have honed in on
this sooner as the problem occurred when the ECU went from  closed loop to open
loop (is that correct or do I have that reversed?) after  about 45 seconds
from starting/restarting. I did spend some time getting really  grounded
(bad, very bad pun) with my vehicle by cleaning up all of the grounding  points
as well as replacing at least 3 spade connectors in the engine
compartment. This should be on every vanagon owners annual checklist, Check the
conditions of all wires, ground points and wire connectors everywhere that you
can access especially in the engine compartment. So many problems  can be
corrected and prevented by doing this on these vehicles. VW knew this when they
 put out a bulletin advising gold connections in many areas of the vehicle
(found  this on Alldata). Thanks to everyone on the list that responded and
corresponded  with me on this issue especially Dennis, Mark (advised
checking the O2 sensor  wire) and Ken. I spent a good bit of quality time on this
problem but just  not in the correct order. Sometimes you remove the engine
hatch and get  distracted on something else that you see or work off of
various hunches and  can't see the forest for the trees. In the future if  see a
wire that  is bent at an odd angle like this one was I will assume that wire
may be bad and  replace it with a new connector. I kept getting distracted
with what appeared to  be a light blue corrosion on the connector  for the
Temp II sensor. I  thought that this might be changing the resistance and
eventually the mixture  like a bad sensor will. All my connections that go to
the ECU and their  corresponding ground wires/points are shiny clean and the
van has never run  smoother. What I thought were just RPM variations from
wear in the distributor  or problems with an old Hall unit were probably
constant input changes to the  ECU and the corresponding blips in the idle level
as readings kept changing.  Sorry for all the details here but maybe it will
help someone else that has a  similar problem. Thanks again to the list for
all of the very likely, plausible  explanations for this problem.

David Clarkson
90 Westy (265k-smooth sailing again)

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