[jeffcoslacker]

It sounds like you have a number of problems, least of which could be a bad head gasket pushing compression into the cooling jacket...but let's try to sort things one at a time.

I've noticed a LOT of the older Honda products are beginning to have issues with electrical demons. Most times in my experience it's from wiring insulation that's brittle and cracked from heat stress and age, and I've found a number of crossed up circuits and shorts on Honda stuff the age of yours and older.

You story reminded me of an '89 Accord I worked on, it was also overheating, running the battery down, and had some other assorted electrical weirdness going. After a LOT of probing and searching, I found the engine wiring harness was a mess, and it was affecting the fans, the coolant temp sensor and the O2 sensor...so rather than try to find every bad spot (plus the wiring cracked more every time you moved it), I replaced that whole part of the engine harness.

What you said about it laying down and refusing to rev over 3000 rpm sounds like what they do when they go into "limp" mode, usually from a loss of crankshaft position signal...the PCM will then only allow low rpm operation, and 3000 rpm sounds like the magic number I remember...

I think yours uses a "wax valve" type of mechanism to regulate cold start idle, based on coolant temp. If you've been overheating for some time, this valve is probably damaged and causing to idle to surge, although there could be other explanations, this jumps to mind as I've seen it happen before...

As far as the pressure in the cooling system goes....that can be a very bad sign, but hard to diagnose from a distance...one good indicator in general is if there is a lot of pressure in hoses before there is any warmth after a cold start...this usually points to a compression leak.

But if the problem is limited to operating temp, the fans probably play a huge role if they aren't working correctly. Again, wiring may be the issue here.

Upshot is, you need someone with some experience to sort through all this...shotgunning it with new parts and hoping is probably not gonna cut it...