I have a 97 ram 1500 with the 5.2 that when the motor is cold it idles very rough like its about to stall then the computer corrects it but then it starts to act up again. I just tuned it up last night, I also checked and cleaned the AIC. Also when i accelerate from a stop the rpms rise but then the truck loses power and makes this loud popping noise so i have to release the pedal and reaccelerate and the truck is fine. This happens pretty often also only when the motor isnt warmed up yet. Thanks in advance.

 

This same thing happened to me when I pulled my engine and put in a new cam, the problem that I had was the ignition timing was off, and the egr valve would open dropping the manifold vaccume. you can test this issuse by on simple thing, the egr is behind the intake manifold on the passenger side. pull the vaccume hose off of the egr valve, the pull the one off of the electronic vacume block. put a the live vaccume line on the egr and start the truck, you should get a larg hissing sound and a rough idle. Also the engine will barely rev usually dying if you try to rev it really hard.

What I had to do on mine becasue the distridutor slipped is turn the crank to top dead center on the number 1 cylinder, and take the distributor cap off, there should be a 1 on the distributor, set the rotor right in top of this spot, and the computer will take care of the rest.

Of course this all a shot in the dark, as this could be caused by a number of things, this just happened to be mine. hope this Idea helps