95 Jetta Acceleration/Power problem

[df992]

95 Jetta GL, 5-speed, 2.0 L, 146,000 miles

Anywhere from 2-5 minutes after start-up, the car begins to shutter and will not accelerate smoothly. Car still runs, does not stall. When I turn the car off, I lose all power -- odomoter, clock and radio all go dead.

Couple things happen from here -- I can remove the key from the ignition, put it back it in, turn it, and the power comes back on, though all settings have been lost. OR, I keep the key in the ignition and the same happens as above when I turn it. OR, upon turning the car off, I only lose power for a split-second, and no settings are lost.

This is an intermittent problem -- happened once last summer, then did not happen again until about two months ago. I can now go up to two weeks without anything happening, and then it can happen a couple days in a row. I thought it was due to cold weather (below 25) but it's been much warmer the past few days and it's been a problem again. I had taken it to the garage, but it was not acting up at that time, so they couldn't help me.

Three other points -- the first time the shuttering happened, my airbag light came on. It has stayed on ever since (while the car has been running, of course). Also, once everything dies and I re-start, it runs fine and does not happen again until at least the next day. Only after sitting for a long period (overnight) will it happen again. And the strangest one of all -- on one occasion, I could not get it to start for almost 5 minutes (any other time it comes on the first time I turn the key) and noticed a very faint humming sound coming from the dash. As it got progressively louder, I put the key in and nothing happened. I then turned the headlight switch, just for the hell of it, and everything came back on!

Any ideas???

[boschmann]

I'd suspect the ignition switch.

[df992]

That was near the top of my list of possible problems. I'll look into it. Thanks.

[kingosiris]

The same thing happened to me about a year ago. I had the same symptoms as you had. It turned out that it was my catolytic converter that was backed up, as well as a faulty distributer. I don't know if they were correlated or not. But that did fix my problem... good luck.