Good to see you got it fixed. I had a little moisture in my oil pan like that too, not that much but some.

 

Same here, I had some in my pan when I dropped it. I'm not sure if it's just condensation, or coolant. I don't have any oil in my coolant, and the oil didn't look milky when I dropped the pan, just a slight milky haze on the bottom. So it's probably just condensation.

I also wondered if the previous owner had put an oil additive in it at one point and let it sit since it smelled exactly like seafoam. Would it be possible he left it sitting after putting seafoam in it and it coated the bottom of the pan like that? It was a little less than the thickness of a US quarter.

 

made the 350 mile trip from New York to Maine with the truck without doing anything to it, fought pining the whole way, topped a lot of hills at 20mph trying to keep out of it. The backfiring and misfiring I described in the original post got pretty bad until I stopped to let it cool off about 75 miles from home. I think I am going to ditch the Bosch double platinums and fo to a set of Autolite 3923s and see if that helps at all. I know the plenum gasket is the usual suspect but i looked down the throttle body and dont see any oil in there so im hoping new plugs will take care of it, i understand our trucks dont do well with platinums....

 

I started the truck up the other day and had the same mysterious knocking/clanging noise. My first thought was the torque converter bolts were loose or fell off, it sounded terrible.

Took my inspection plate off and found nothing. Eventually figured out that the noise is actually coming from inside the cat. I guess a piece of it broke off inside.

Just helping some future people who have this problem come up with more places to start.