My car has recently developed a stalling issue. I took the lid of the DME box one night, and ever since things have been kinda funny. Let me drag you folks through what I've had to deal with so far.

The first time it happened was immediately after removing the DME lid to see if I could get a better vantage point on the washer filler neck screws ( I couldn't). When it went back together the car cranked, but would not start. pulled the lid, started immediately. "Ok that was weird whatever." I didn't think much of it until the next night, when it wouldn't drive for very long, maybe a few feet, before stalling out. managed to get it to a safe place, popped the hood, banged on the DME cover Jeremy Clarkson style, and the car came to life enough for me to get home.

The next day, I drove the car 70 miles WITHOUT ISSUE. I put in a full day's worth of work and come back to my car to start it and warm it up (it has an intake gasket leak, seals when the engine warms up) and by the time I get back to the car it was running normally. I got maybe 0.1 miles away and it stalls and won't start, no amount of tapping is helping me. Luckily, my buddy who has a lot of experience with e32's was nearby. He helped me diagnose this.

First, we discovered the engine wouldn't run with the hood closed. If you started the engine with the hood open, it would shut off the moment we dropped the hood. Curiously the normally bright CEL was very dim but illuminated. OK unplug the hood switch, now it's idling again, but the car is stalling before every shift, weird. Eventually we found an old forum post where someone had a similar issue and remedied it by removing the gas cap, this actually worked. I was not able to drive the car home, but I was able to limp it to his office where it sat for a week or two. Interestingly, the car wasn't stalling, but it was cutting throttle hard from a standstill until it shifted into second or third. I had the car towed to my mechanic for wheel speed sensors (one had broken off in the wheel hub) where it was for about a week and a half. I was able to drive it home just fine from the mechanic's shop, which is only about 3-4 miles away.

Now, the car has sat around for essentially 3-4 weeks since the first instance of crank no starting. I just started working on it again this past weekend. One of my Lithuanian friends suggested reflowing the DME as they are known to develop cold solder joints.

So I did just that, looking under the microscope there were a LOT of cold joints. I reinstalled the newly reflowed 484 and it got up the driveway and down the block, and then stalled. I tried every trick I had but it kept stalling! What I noticed this time was that every time it stalled it flashed "Trans. Failsafe Prog". Now this is nothing new, I'd seen this message a million times before, it always would randomly complain about the transmission when the cluster freaks out (only does that when it's hot inside the car). However, I had never had a stalling issue.

Last night I decided to reflow the EGS as a last ditch effort. It was still stalling, so I pulled the DME box lid (again) and started touching wires to see if it was a bad connection inside some wire. And then I discovered something I had never noticed before. There was a 12 pin connector (2x6) that connected two different harnesses that wasn't plugged in, it was just sort of sitting on its opposing connector. Plugging that back in got everything moving again! I couldn't believe it! I'd been chasing a stupid connector for a whole month! So I did what anyone else would do, a victory lap!

Well, the lap lasted 5.5 miles before the cluster sperged out and flashbanged my favorite "Trans. Failsafe Prog" message and the CEL went dim. Now this time all of my usual tricks failed, except for one.... I unplugged the cluster. Tried to start the car, crank no start. "Well, whatever I'm gonna have to call AAA, might as well reinstall the cluster." As I plug in the cluster I see that the CEL is bright again and I start the car and was able to drive away and complete my victory lap without failure, which was about 15 miles.

Now here are my concerns.

1. This is an EWS I car, meaning EWS is integrated into the DME, so idk how to reprogram a new cluster to this beast in NCS Expert.
2. The cluster in there is an original with an external IKE box and the 44pin connector between the Kombi and IKE.
3. the 44pin harness is disintegrating and there are a lot of exposed wires.
4. when the car gets hot, the cluster reads erroneously and sporadically, and the clock doesn't advance.
5. the IKE does not communicate at all over D-CAN.
6. when a new cluster is installed, everything can suddenly talk over D-CAN

the last time I got the trans failsafe issue, I saw the tachometer spike and then it stalled, I got the message, yada yada yada. This makes me believe that the cluster is failing in such a way that it is bringing other components down that it talks to.

However there are other theories, something I read online suggested perhaps the DME relay could be becoming intermittent, well with all the vibrations due to the vacuum leak, yeah that's certainly possible, I could buy that. The DME is a cheap enough Item, I can easily swap in a replacement and see if that helps me, as a last ditch effort. Now luckily, I have a second external IKE cluster on hand, I replaced the LCD ribbon cable, and have cloned the EEPROM from the original funky cluster to the "new" one. Now in theory this should be a plug and play sort of thing, but I'll let you guys know how that goes for me.