thanks in advance for any & all advise:

for the past several months, my '84 244 with 220,000 has had a slight stumbling issue first thing in the morning, that always quickly subsided so i did not address it

on friday, started to run VERY rough - no power under load & awful acclerataion, stalled a couple of times in town - but it did keep on going & could get up to hiway speed so i drove it 50 mile for work ... always felt like it was missing/stumbling. gas milage went down to almost 10 mpg versus the usual ~23 mpg.

yesterday spent the day reading up in the archives of the BrickBoard & trying to troubleshoot the problem. cleaned the throttle-body, visually inspected all the vacum hoses, established that it ran even worse with the AMM unplugged, cleaned connections at AMM & temp sensor - didn't seem to help. decided it must be the fuel pressure regulator. found a store with a new one in stock (not Bosch however). put it in, and everything seemed to be solved - started up & ran just fine for a 5 mile test drive. changed the oil as recommended in an archived BB-post to rid the oil pan of excess gas & installed new plugs - which were sooty black. started it up & it ran awful again. was getting cold & dark & i was mighty discouraged, so called it quits.

this morning, started up, stalled once, re-started and ran fine. drove it 10 miles to work on the highway (75+ mph) no problem.

any idea as to where to look next ??

thanks again