About this time last year I was troubleshooting an unstable idle -- when I would take the car out of gear (it being a manual trans) occasionally the idle would bounce and sometimes die. The problem was never serious but I thought I had solved it by removing everything, cleaning the ICV real good (didn't look like it was frozen but did have a lot of black buildup in places) and putting it all back together. It's been good for the past year but now it died on me a couple times in the last month. So I bought all the goofy gasket rings in the intake tract (between the MAF and the throttle body) and am about to replace them. I also found a hose clamp missing so I'm replacing that, and when I was doing the starter last month I found one of the vacuum caps on the back of the manifold was cracked -- got a replacement for that too. Here's hoping it's just a minor vacuum leak and this will solve it.

Smoke test it and you'll know for sure. Another thing to check is the little elbow that feeds into the ICV. It is notorious for developing small cracks that aren't obvious.

Unstable idle with stslli was the exact symptom that brought me to xoutpost.

It was the intake cam sensor. Every m54 I've worked on eventually did this. No error related to sensor just that symptom. It always would present when driving slow like moving forward one position to turn across traffic or pulling into parking spaces.

If that matches your stall scenario; putt forward 20' put in the clutch and gas off and it stalls.

Before the X5, I drove a 1991 Volvo 240 as my airport beater. I had a similar problem forgetting some meds on checking into an airport hotel for an early departure the next morning... didn't know that poor old thing could do 95mph...

Given the gearing on my 5spd E53, I wouldn't even try going that fast, not at almost 200,000mi.

Oh, today: drove over an hour to pick over not one but two E53s that were added to one of the pull-a-part yards in GA (the Lithonia one) THIS MORNING! This never happens, I usually get the email ping while I'm out of the area for work, so I headed down hoping to snag a good nav-screen head unit.

Both had the standard "business CD" thing, whatever "business CD" was supposed to mean... the post-LCI one had an intact pano sunroof as of today.

Anyway got two good A-pillar trims to replace my warped ones, though one is black and the other beige. Where does one buy a few feet of mouse fur these days? Figure I'd pull off the old wrinkly stuff and use spray mount to glue on some new stuff, if I can find it.

I've never experienced stalling in gear, but I'll try creeping around in first at 5 mph and see what happens next time I drive it. I actually replaced the intake cam sensor two summers ago -- after I did the OFHG it turns out I had pinched the cam sensor wire under the housing. It actually lasted a few months IIRC before it wore down the insulation and shorted out. But I bought the only one in town -- got it from napa and it didn't have a name brand. Now that I think about it, my idle problems started a few months after that. Maybe I should put it on my list. Wasn't hard to replace.
I may just pay a local indie to do that, depending on how bad of a problem it becomes. I did replace the entire rubber intake boot about 4-5 years ago, so that's brand new.

Cam sensors are stupid sensitive. When I replaced each of mine and wife's I found an OEM on Amazon and they lasted the life of the car.

I spent 90 minutes fishing the wire under the intake on the first one the second got the five min. over the intake wire routing!

last week I did my taxes and apart from a big bill for the front suspension I was happy that beemie didn't get too many workshop visits... should have knocked on wood...

yesterday the passenger side window went down but didn't want to come back up. After taking the door panel off and a little assistance it works again but I won't be putting it fully down any more before getting this fixed...

I'm guessing window regulator, what's the opinion here? It can't make the first inch or so from the bottom.

When that happened to me just the bolt/nut at the bottom came loose. I was able to the the window up the few times I accidentally lowered it fully with a little guidance from above with a stick pulling the back edge forward into the track. Take apart to discover the fastener rolling around at the bottom of the door.

haha that would be a nice fix :) I'll try looking for that nut!

I already had the clip to replace imagine my surprise the nut fell off. It's not magnetic was a bitch to recover from the seam at the bottom of the door!


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