Howdy all. First post, despite a long history of using and abusing Volvos in my family...

Well, my Wife's '92 240 (Auto) finally developed a problem that I didn't anticipate or understand...

Almost immediately after picking up her car after having some oil leakes sorted out (PCV and valve cover gaskets were leaking), the car started having problems with idling and hesitation under load.

Initially the problem was only when cold, (cold idle surging and minor hesitation when pulling away from stops, etc.) but within a couple of days it degraded to a fairly serious idle control and hesitation problem.

I'm curious since all of this JUST started happening after getting the car back from the dealer. (Aside from the oil leaks, the car had been running fine before).

The dealer gave my wife a diagnosis of "Bad PROM" and told her he had to order a new one and the parts and labor would come to $200.

This confuses the hell out of me. If it was a complete replacement ECU, I'd expect the cost to be closer to $800. If it was just a PROM reflash, shouldn't it be more like $80? (And why would he need to order one?) And why did all this happen right after they fixed to minor gasket leaks?

I've tried to search through the FAQs and archives and I've come up with procedure #28-102 which looks to describe some of the same problems and a similar sounding solution, but it sounds to me that this is more of a "chronic" problem, not something that just starts happening overnight...

Wife's desperate to get her car back, so she told the dealer to order the replacement, now I'm having trouble getting through to him to have *MY* questions answered.

Are we getting taken for a ride? Did the dealer break something and is now charging us all or part of the cost to repair it? I'm not aware of any reasons a PROM chip would just "fail" unless it was being subjected to some kind of abuse. At the very least I feel like the dealer should be concerned that the new PROM would suffer the same fate if they don't find and fix any other electrical problems....

Ugh...