I was having some weird, intermittent symptoms which were complicated by
other issues, but it turned out that at least part of my hot running issue
and most of my low power issue was caused by a clogged cat. In my cat there
were, or appeared to be, two formed pieces of 'honeycomb', one at each end.
They were both intact, but one of them had come loose and was travelling
around in the cat. Sometimes the van would run normally, and sometimes it
would run (using the term loosely) like hell. Apparently it would sometimes
land in such a way that most of the exhaust would pass normally and other
times it would block the pipe. I couldn't figure out any way to secure the
thing in place and I didn't have time to try anyway, so I wound up pounding
the stuff out. I could see from some of the larger chunks that survived that
it was getting occluded anyway, but I think it would have had some fair
amount of life left in it had it not broken loose like that... it kind of
chapped my ass to have to bust it up prematurely, as it were.

I told my wife that driving a 22 year old vehicle after having it sit up
like it did meant 'driving out the problems'- in other words we were going
to have a period of many failures large and small until we cleared out most
of the weak points, and so here we are.

Now I have to try to figure out if my idle control is really dead or if it's
a connection issue.

This van is costing me a lot of Wilderbucks lately. : (

Ah well- at least I have enough seatbelts going now for the carpool kids.

Cya,

Robert