3.9 V6 Backfire/power Loss

[xs313]

I have spent about 8 months living with this problem. I have an 02 dakota v6 with 114K on it. What happens is when you start it up its fine, but after about a minute or so just idling, it starts to become progressively rougher and will sometimes even stall out the motor. If you give it gas in this condition, it won't even rev higher. You could push it to the floor and all it will do is backfire. Now get this - all I do is turn the key off and restart it, and its fine, I can lite my tires up. This doesn't just happen on startup, also if I put it in park and let it idle for a few minutes, I'll get back in and put it in drive, the thing will pop and backfire and go nowhere until I restart it, then its fine until the next occurrence. Now when I replaced my timing chain I put a timing light on the thing and noticed that #1 cyl. ignition was somewhat erratic. So I thought I had play in my distributor shaft. But before I replaced it, I thought if it was the distributor, why would it be ok right after a restart? Troubling, huh... Now here's what I ruled out as problems:

O2S - 4 brand new
Timing chain - brand new installed w/ new tensioner
TPS - brand new
Vaccuum leak - sealed all my leaks
Fuel system - fine, if anything, its running too damn rich and backfiring lol
Spark plugs - all brand new


This problem has got the best of me. When I bought this truck I was going to put all kinds of performance parts under the hood and its just pissing me off that I can't even find out what the hell this problem is. It's fairly common, I can see a few on this message board about it. Now if its so common, why can't anyone find a solution to this. Please help.