Rough running Astro leads to an empty wallet

I have had my Astro for little over 2 years. I can't complain much it's run it's wheels off for me and only complained a couple of times. This time it was serious.
All the repairs started out actually with overheating problems which turned out to be a bad thermostat. That was easy enough to replace no problems there.
The next problem started from running out of gas while checking the new thermostat. We thought was a clogged fuel filter since I had recently ran it out of gas (husband gets furious with me if I let it get lower than an eighth of a tank) and it was out of gas again. Again this problem was easy enough to do. Fuel filter replaced no problems there until we tried to start it and all it would do was turn over but not start.
Somehow the gas go into the oil so now we had to do a complete oil change and get the gas out of the oil. My husband and I were ready to push it down the hill and set fire to it (which almost happened a couple of times while trying to figure out if the injectors where bad or clogged.
When I wasn't out under or inside the doghouse opening trying to help him I was searching for solutions and came across this site. This is a great site for the shade tree mechanics. That's when I discovered out problems could possibly be a vacuum line. And discovered a solution to a problem it had when we bought it. No air from the dash vents only the floor and the defroster. It's been extremely hot here in Oklahoma lately and it was really a bummer to have to drive the thing anywhere with no air. The posts here helped tremendously with that and trying to figure out why it wouldn't start.
Then a friend of ours stopped by and we told him what it was doing and he said he had a pickup do that to him one time and it was the TBI gasket. He asked if he could check it out and see and we said it's all yours. Sure enough when he pulled the TBI off the gasket turned to dust when touched or wasn't even there at all. So we headed for the parts store. I won't even go there because we were told they would be open and then after driving 50 miles trying to get there before 9 pm the time we were told the store closed and arrived at 4 minutes past 8 to discover they closed at 8 pm. Checked to see if another one in the same chain had a TBI rebuild kit in stock and how late they were open. We were told yes another store had one and were open until midnight. After waiting 45 minutes in line at a very busy parts store we were told they would have to order one. Furious by this time and out of stores and getting late. A friend of our friend called and believe it or not he just by chance had odds and ends leftover gaskets and o-rings from previous rebuilds in a box and hopefully would have the ones we needed. If not he had an extra TBI that would get us running until the parts store opened. In the meantime while my husband was running from store to store we were going over the vacuum lines and replacing them one by one when we found our culprit. One of the lines was very soft and about 2 inches from the connection it had collapsed and split. We had missed that when we checked for splits at the connection. We couldn't find an open vacuum line to connect the spaghetti line to except the vent on something (can't remember what it was) so that's where we plugged it into. That is until I replaced the last vacuum line with new rubber hose and when I pulled it off the orb on the orb near the right front fender well I went to put the new line back on and there were two outlets. The one I had just pulled and one that had about an inch of rubber hose and what we thought was a piece of spaghetti line (turned out to be the connector itself we just pulled the old rubber piece off and rerouted the spaghetti line to this connection which left the vent on the other thing open.
Time to see if all this was worth it or in vain. WOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!!! She started and is running like a dream. No more rough idle or misses. No more overheating. And OMG!!! I have air blowing out of the vents on the dash. Now I just want to go somewhere so I can enjoy my nice little Astro I only gave 600 for. So if you are having rough idle and stuff like that and they keep telling you to do a tune up and just a week or so later it's back to the way it was before the tuneup try checking the gaskets on the TBI. Good luck all you shade tree mechanics out there and hope you have very few or no cracked knuckles in your quest for a fine tuned vehicle you did yourself.
Thanks to all those people that post to this forum it's great and answered so many questions and was such a big help. I will tell all my friends with car troubles they can more than likely find their solution here. Have a great day!!!!!!!!!!!

Good to hear that all is working. mine did the same thing, but she just got converted into propane and found out that my TBI gasket was also gone with my head gasket leaking heavily. any hills that i was trying to go on, i simply got stuck at 30 km/h and couldn't go any faster. lack of everything. power, poor fuel mileage, well all in the bad, you know what i mean.

but after all this ... the engine will need a rebuild even though all my vaccuum lines have been replaced. Cyl #4 is leaking oil heavily. i still can fly at 130 km/h in a full load at 3500 lbs of cargo, buti still need more power. lol

So even though Chevy have there flaws? i still love them no matter what happen. Chevy's are quite reliable.