I think you are SOL.
My suggestion would be
1. tell the owner of the minivan to buy you 6 packs of cold beer and a good lunch.
2. Trace the wiring loom and see where it goes. First you need to figure out if the short is inside or outside of the car. There is 2 common area with chaffed harness i've seen is behind the Intake manifold and behind the driver side wheel well, see which way ur wiring loom goes.
3. If you can locate the connector that separate the wire loom from inside and outside of the car, disconnect it, see which side the short is on.

Alldata's info is kinda limited at this point, i guess you just have to tear apart the car.
or use ur volt meter to monitor the grounding status, and tug on wiring loom and see which location breaks the ground, since you that "it worked for a wire".

Good luck!!

 

I thought the C2 connector in the fuse box went straight to the PDC under the hood ? No ?

 

PDC = Fuse Box. The harness goes down, and splits all over the car. That's what i meant u are SOL. Sometimes these type of problem could take my whole day to find the Melted section of the wireloom.

 

The C2 connector is at the junction block. That is the fuse box inside the car. The PDC is the fuse box by the battery. If the short goes away when you disconnect the C2 connector, you only have to worry about the pins that that fuse supplies (4 and 11). And going to ground and shorted to ground are different. Everything goes to ground, we're looking for something that registers 0 ohms or close to it. If you can, remove each terminal one at a time and see when the fuse stops blowing, then we can concentrate on that circuit.

 

you only have to worry about the pins that that fuse supplies (4 and 11) Ok im guessing this means pins 4 and 11 on the C2 connector in the fusebox that will simplify things. When C2 is connected it does register 0 Ohms what i was taught is a dead short disconnect C2 it goes away. I am going down today to attack it again ill check those pins thanks Tizzy 1.

 

Ok unsure but i think i did this right ..... i took out the battery swung the pdc out traced the no 4 pin to a grey connector at the front of the pdc in the first row closest to the front of the van same color wire and it is shorting to ground right from the pdc....or is it supposed too ? i admit im a little out of my element here but i can take direction any idea where to look next alldata does not appear to be a lot of help here

 

Pretty close to throwing in the towel on this one....I just checked one of the working vans here i have 3 of them and the TS BU LMP fuse is supposed to go to ground...at least it does on one of the working vans so it would appear i have been barking up the wrong tree all day.... that sucks. the only things known for sure at this point is the fuse continues to blow however if C2 OR C4 are disconnected at the junction block the fuse does not blow ....i have no idea where to go at this point i did finally find the pinouts for C2 and C4 but since it would appear some of these wires go to ground by design then im lost.....oh yeah and pin 11 on C2 in the junction block goes straight to ground...that is supposed to be fused B+ i would think that should not go to ground but .....?

 

seemed to have fixed one problem and caused another one .... disconnected the neutral start back up switch and now everything works which makes sense i guess the BU lights on this van never worked.... obviously a short that got worse over time course now it wont start LOL

 

Here's a diagram for that circuit.

 

I'm betting you know the start system needs to know the tranny is in park to allow you to start the engine. With the switch disconnected it doesn't know so won't start.

Since you are talking about the park/neutral switch I'm guessing you have a 3 speed tranny. On 3rd generation (96-00) vans I believe the 4 speed tranny uses a transmission range sensor, better known as the TRS, instead of the switch. It's burried deep inside the tranny. In that sense at least you're lucky you don't have to dive inside the tranny to fix this headache. Your perseverence sure did pay off. Congrats.