After two solid days under the hood and 1 sunburn later, my car seems to be in good working order. No more oil leak, no more starting problem, no more idling problem. Thank you, God.
I took her for a brief spin tonight, and she smells a little funny from some spilled coolant, but otherwise works great.
Here is the rundown:
Symptoms:
1. Car idled poorly
2. Car would crank over, but would not start.
3. Car had a rather bad oil leak.
Solution:
I bought one of those book about my Lumina. It was VERY handy. After some reading I decided what I needed to do. I sort of suspected where the oil leak was coming from, the distributor dummy rod. Fortunately, it was on the side of the engine I would have to tear down.
I removed the throttle body, EGR valve, and air plenum. That gave me plenty of room to pull the rod and replace a very dry and brittle o-ring, solving my oil leak. I hear this is a common problem spot for these 3.1 engines. I bought some throttle body cleaner at auto zone as well as some replacement gaskets, a couple hoses, and some lock tite. I took the EGR valve apart and gave it a good cleaning. It was rather dirty with quite a bit of build up. I cleaned up the throttle body and plenum with the cleaner. I slapped on some new gaskets, a couple new hoses, and patched her back up in one afternoon.
Like I said, she runs great so far, but time will tell.
To be honest I think the EGR valve just needed a good cleaning, but I went ahead and did a little extra to be sure. Some extra clean parts won't hurt the car, I'm sure.
All in all, I'd say I spent about 50 bucks on all the parts and it took me 2 days. I got an oil leak fixed and a coolant flush in that price as well. This is the most complicated work I have done on a car to date, and it wasn't so bad.
The worst part was removing and reinserting the hoses. Man, some of those were rough, and took up more time than any other one thing.
Thanks to everyone who had words of advice. You guys helped out a lot!
Thanks and good night!
-Fry