What a bunch of great responses. I'm sorry that I forgot to say that my car is a 85 245 wagon, B230 with LH Jetronic. I went out yesterday to hunt the problem and did the following. Cranked car and let it idle, it sounded sort of like a telegraph machine, dut dut, dut dut dut, dut dut, missing ocassionally on one cylinder. As I was cranking, I held the fuel pump relay in my hand, it clicked and the car started, so the ignition module and primary were OK. One by one, I un-plugged and re-attached the fuel injectors. By listening to the idle, I determined that the miss was apparently coming from the #1 cylinder because on cylinders 4,3 and 2 the random miss was still there even with the injector unplugged. When I unplugged the #1 injector, the engine had a solid miss on #1. and the randomn miss was gone. I pulled on the #1 plug wire and the wire (easily) came out of the plug end. It had burned off. I cut off about 1 inch and screwed it back on, re-attached it to the plug, and the misfire problem was gone. It's time for a full tune-up, especially with the gas prices as they are. The exhaust smell is apparently related to something else. I believe that it's probably related to the Cat convertor. Last week I was driving across a cow pasture (It's my work "truck") and a rock flew up and hit the underside of the car. From reading the (very informative) posts, it occurs to me that it could have damaged the Cat and that I probably have a partially blocked exhaust. I will post as I find out. If I could give one piece of advice from all my years of driving and working on Volvos it would be, Look for the simple things first if you have a problem, cause that's likely where you'll find it. Man I love these cars. Thanks for all of the replies.
steve