Thanks for the great info. I will have time in the morning tomorrow to spend some time checking things out so I will try the things you suggested.
And since I am a jeep owner I am all too much familiar with bypasses. Us jeepers like our bypasses haha. For instance, my neutral safety switch on one of my jeeps acts up and doesn't allow it to start, so I wired a push button that jumps the starter relay, so when it acts up my jeep turns into a "push to start". I had wondered if there was a bypass for the ASD (even just to test and confirm or deny my issue is something to do with the ASD or not) but I didn't mention it because I wasn't sure how people would react to that lol. Whenever I discuss my "bypasses" anywhere but with other jeep friends people gasp and scold me and tell me how dangerous it is. Yeah yeah it could be a little unsafe but I'm the only one who touches my jeeps so its pretty safe IMO 😅

You can pull apart that neutral safety switch , clean it , lil' grease and reassemble to fix . Pretty sure those didn't change after 97 . I did it to my 97 XJ . I almost did that button like you until I found the how to . 1 hour fix .

If the issue is in the PDC , bypassing shouldn't be an issue . If anything else is wrong , you could get more issues . To use it just to see if the pump primes , should be ok too . However , if you play with fire , just be ready to put one out also .

I do a lot of things I "shouldn't" do but it's nice to know those red neck fixes too when on the trail . Only time I ever called a tow truck is when I bust a diff . I remember driving cross country once in a mustang , alt bracket broke and it was -30 in the middle of nowhere . 10 mins later I had it wired up with coat hangers and vice grips , then drove it another 1000 miles to home w/o issue . They can say what they want about red neck fixes . That one saved my *** !

Yeah, I know about the cleaning fix, I had to do it to the XJ I daily drive. But the one I have a push button start on is just a trail rig and its not even worth the hour to clean the nss. Plus, the underneath is so packed with mud and has been for so long the nss will probably break if I try to take it off, so push button was the ebst option lol.

I have fire extinguishers mounted in both my trail rig xj and my daily driver xj as well as one mounted to my welding table in the garage and one mounted on the other side of the wall in the garage. I am good at setting things on fire haha.

Trail fixes are life savers, on and off the trail. Once my brother called me and said something broke on his truck (he has a '95 ram 1500) and his drivers side tire was facing out and his passengers side tire was still facing straight. I knew it was his tie rod so I grabbed a ratchet strap and headed to his location. I got there, his tie rod had come apart from the steering knuckle, the "nipple" from the tie rod had just come out of the casing on the tie rod so I took a jack and jacked the tie ro back into the nipple the best I could and then wrapped the rathet strap around it a bunch of times and tied up up tight and he drove it home 12 miles that was. Obviously he had to drive super slow and take very wide turns but it got him home and saved him a hundred dollar tow.

Heh. My throttle linkage ball socket fell apart on the interstate while driving through Dallas, while towing a 10k+++ pound trailer. A couple of zip ties kept it on the road all the way back north of Seattle.