It's always helpful to me when people follow up with their solution to a problem so here is mine.

It turns out that it was the distributor/Hall-effect. I swapped in my extra distributor (once I found it) and it fired right up. Interestingly it now idles better than it has since I bought the van almost two years ago. Until now, I've not been able to get it to idle reliably below 1200rpm. Now it's a steady 800rpm or so. Performance is just a little flat though, however I haven't properly timed it yet.

Mark K
1986 GL/2WD/4SPD
1990 Carat/2WD/Auto

On Jul 14, 2010, at 8:15 AM, Mark A Kippert wrote:

> While inspecting the distributor it looks like the hall sender may be damaged. I have another distributor in a 2.1L core I purchased on craigslist for $25 (P.O. did a Subaru swap). Unfortunately it's stored in my son's garage so I have to go pull it in the next day or so. Hope that's the problem.
> 
> 
> On Jul 12, 2010, at 6:38 PM, David Beierl wrote:
> 
>> Candidates are the Hall-effect generator in the
>> distributor, the connector at the distributor, the ECU, the coil and
>> the various wiring and connections in between.
>>