It could be something as simple yet infuriatingly difficult to find as a corroded or loose electrical connector, and the fact of the PCM having been replaced makes this more likely than if it had never been unplugged at all.

Way back when I was younger, smarter, and better looking I worked on a spacetrack radar that was around 15 years old at the time. We went through a lot of pink erasers cleaning circuit board edge connectors that had just enough barely visible corrosion on them to cause intermittent problems. There were even times when we had to get the system back online in a hurry (because our primary mission was missile warning) and would just smack hell out of a cabinet to shock all of the connections to get the flaky one back. It wasn't elegant, but it did the trick.

Good luck with it, and please let us know what you find in the end.

 

Excuse me? You are expecting something to MAKE SENSE?????

That is your first error.

 

Yes indeed, I am.

Could be, but I prefer it to monkeying around with things I don't understand. It's a foible I'm stuck with.



I may get nowhere with it but I'll get there fast!

 

I gave up expecting things to make sense during the Nixon administration. Especially, after working in the Ford garage....... When I started working on computers, that was even more reinforced.

 

So did I, but then it seemed that we were collectively ready to make good sense when Carter moved into the big house. Then along came Ronny Rayguns and I knew I'd been terribly mistaken, and I've not seen any cause to change my mind since.

I'm a self-employed contract programmer and remote system administrator -- I know exactly what you mean. Much more than usual, lately, because I'm working a major project to interface a black box legacy back-end system to a gray box remote system that's scantily documented and much of the documentation that exists is wrong. And the remote system's developer support staff seems to be making things up as they go along, so I end up hacking at it until I get the results I expect out of it.

I knew to expect problems when I learned that the remote system is implemented in java, but I had some smattering of hope for better than I've seen because it was implemented by a global corporation whose name graces a stadium in San Diego. That hope has since been most proficiently dashed.

The computers make sense, but unfortunately the things they've been told to do don't make much sense at all.

But I digress...

 

And this is different from normal how?

Bold: Sounds like Microsoft Standard Operating Procedure. (but I don't think it was them..... maybe they are "emulating"?)

And yeah, we seem to be wandering a bit off topic here....... but, again, that is different from normal how??

 

No argument on any point, Sir. Normality is not in danger of violation here.

Mine's an all Unix shop, though I do run windoze in VMware for Netflix and online poker. I quit writing software for windoze not long after they went to a 32 bit version of a 16 bit operating system originally written for an 8 bit processor, not worth four bits, and written by a two bit company...

 

Ahhh, Unix... A user friendly O/S. Just rather picky about who it's friends are.....

Love the last line there. Fortunately, I saw you coming, and am drinking distilled water. You know, the stuff you are SUPPOSED to clean your screen with?

 

It was my first operating system back in the big iron days, so we've been on good terms for a while now. Since late last month, I think.

If it weren't for Netflix and online poker I'd not have windoze anywhere. There's no reason to subject perfectly good hardware to that crap. It'd be like putting Nissan seats in a Ram truck: Might work well enough to keep you going most of the time but it'll always be a pain in the ***.

Man, you gotta let people help you. Here I am working on convincing your little woman that you need that slick new dual head 32" high def monitor setup, and all you're doing is getting in the way!