This morning my son's email message subject line read "Very bad car news" so at least he prepared me. I only have the text of his message to go by for now, but I wanted to post this to see if there are a couple likely explanations. The car is an '87 240DL w/210K. He has had a little trouble with poor starting on damp days (folowed by rough running for a little while), so I put a new set of OEM plug/coil wires. That seemed to help some, but the problem did not go away entirely. Other relatively recent maintenance includes a new distributor cap, rotor, plugs, and (about a year ago) flame trap. A year ago we also replaced the timing belt. It runs smooth as silk--except for the occasional hard starting I mentioned. Here is a portion of the message I received:

"I was coming home last night after dropping samantha off and the car started to die on me, which i figured was from the rainy day but it was a lot worse than it had been in the past. I had to drive up the hill to my house in first gear, but it would hardly move. I parked and saw smoke coming from under the car so i looked underneath and there were flames in a spiral formation coming from somewhere. I know this was dumb but I ran and got a fire extinguisher and put it out quickly. I have no idea what the fire was from, the oil wasn't low and the car wasn't running strangely before the sudden onset of the dying engine. It was weird though, the car would idle fine but when I'd start out in first gear it was extremely sluggish. I looked under the car again after awhile but i couldn't see exactly where the flames had originated--too dark."

I will try to get more specifics later today, but in the meantime does anyone want to weigh in on this with limited information at hand? I'll welcome any and all leads or advice. I'm hoping my son's early reports of the Volvo's demise are exaggerated. As always, thanks to all. Mike F.