........well to be more specific, my car acts normal in the morning when its warming up, and acts normal when i'm driving. But here is the thing: after i drive it around for awhile, when i shut off the engine and restart it after a few min. the engine starts "surging" in "P" and when i put it in "D", the engine rpms drop to about 400 and the cars starts to miss bad when i give it gas. To give a better example; if someone has ever put TB cleaner in the manifold and then tried to start their car , the effect would be the same as to what i'm trying to describe.
here's the funny thing though. The "flooding symptom" as i like to call it, only lasts for about 10 sec and the car drives normal again. That is of course untill i shut it off and then restart it again.
has anyone had a similar symptom? what could it be? TPS? MAF? i'm really pissed right now. I just got done replacing the o2 sensor, new PCV vavle, and i cleaned out the EGR vavle. so far nothing.

 

could be a vaccum leak somewhere.. wild guess.

 

I'm sure if it's your situation, I had similiar symptoms when my timing belt was jumping.
Normal, to surging, to really *******. And alot of missing. Hard to tell not hearing it in person.

 

it sounds like a water temp sensor. I hope this is it since it's a $12 part and takes 2min to change. Good luck!

 

well, i hope; cause now things just got worse. I was just in the drive-thru getting something to eat and was in there for a good 5 min just idling and the car started to act up again. the engine started stumbling but as soon as i started to drive again, the stumbling/surging stopped.
what about injectors? how can u tell if they are starting to go?

 

The first thing to do is remove each sparkplug wire individually while running. You can try this when its running fine, and each killed sparkplug should make the car stumble then recover. If one doesn't affect the engine, most likely that injector or sparkplug coil is dead.

If it's already running crappy and you do the above, pulling a sparkplug will most likely kill the engine, meaning that cylinder is functioning. If it has no affect on the crappy running of the engine, that cylinder is probably dead.

The other thing you can do is pull the injector connectors individually while it's running and see if it affects the engine. On a VQ it is easy to do this to the front bank and impossible on the rear, on a VG it's all impossible, I've never worked on a VE. Finally, if you can get to the connectors with the engine cool and off, then you can test the resistance across the injector. Between 10 and 14 ohms is acceptable. Anything else indicates a dead injector.

 

Probabaly a coil pack, I have a bad one and it does this every once in a while too.

 

well i find out what the problem is: i have a leaking head gasket. the stumbling @ idle is coolant in the combustion chamber; hence why i'm getting white smoke on start up. price to fix is $1600 from my local shop. I told them no thanks cause i can just get a used motor from Japan for $1700 installed with a one year warranty. i'm really pissed. that money was supposed to be for my camaro!

 

wow, i've never seen a maxima with a blown head gasket....sorry