OK, success!  (I'm pretty sure with a 20 mile highway test, so far so
good)

  I am pretty sure it was the O2 sensor, what with the almost parted sender
wire and the sensor itself  being  old.   I put the new one in without much
trouble. Then I tested a couple of Temp II senders I had kicking around my
spares pile as well as the one that was running in the van.  They all
tested within the Bently book readings but I went ahead and changed to a
different one and cleaned all the contacts there, also.
   And I found a vacuum line hanging free, the one that comes from the
throttle body and controls a warm up valve in the airbox area...That may
have been part of my 'hesitation on resume throttle' that has been nagging
me for a while but not serious enough to chase down...

  On filling this tank of gas today,  where I was having the stumbling
problem I got only 19mpg, well under my recent average, so I guess I was
running very rich at times...It will be interesting to see if my gas
mileage goes back to where it was a while back...in the neighborhood of
23-25mpg...recently I have only been seeing 22-23, which doesn't surprise
me now that I found the O2 sensor must have been virtually dysfunctional
with only one little strand of a 18 ga wire left in the signal sender
wire...

  I want to thank everyone for helping me with this....You are the
greatest!   Saved me a lot of false starts...pointed me right to the
problem and we got it!

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Don Hanson <dhanson928@gmail.com> wrote:

>   I also found one of my small vacuum lines disconnected at the throttle
> body...Purple one, I think it goes to the charcoal cannister...it heads
> over that way anyhow.  Plugged that back in.
>