I have a 1995 Cirrus with a 2.5 V6. The problem just started about a week ago. The car will start and idle just like new when the engine is cold, but if I let it warm up or drive it and shut it off it will flood the engine when I try to restart it. This happened at the same time that the water temp guage quit working. I checked the the water temp sensor and it checks out ok. When you unplug the wt sensor harness it will turn the fan on, so I think the ecm is sensing that the temp is high when the sensor is unpluged, but the wt guage does not move off of the cold position. Is it possible that the wt guage is some how involved or is it two separate issues?

Steve

 

Yep. The PCM is not receiving the engine temperature signal, so it does not know to cut back on the fuel, because it doesn't know that it is at operating temperature. It will keep thinking that the engine is cold until the PCM gets the correct signal from the temperature sensor. It could be the sensor itself, a bad/dirty connection or bad/broken wiring between the two.