Not another starting problem... Hopefully this one's different, and hopefully someone can help. I've done a search on the Brickboard but came up with nothing similar, though I'm now terrified of "lawnmower syndrome"... (on a side topic, what's the deal with that? I understand it's a '93 thing, but are '94 Turbos succeptable?)

The car is a 1994 850 Turbo wagon, B5234FT with an automatic. It was a US car, transplanted to Canada. 136,000 miles now on it. This is my wife's car and it's fairly new to us (3-4 months) so I'm not all that familiar with it yet. So far it's been perfectly reliable, with never a hint of trouble. In the past couple of weeks, a peculiar starting difficulty has surfaced and it's starting to get worse.

The car turns over absolutely normally - NOT spinning really fast like it has lost compression, not rough, nothing different. The only thing is, after the normal 1/2 second of cranking, it does NOT start. It doesn't do anything except spin and spin. I've held the starter for up to 30 seconds without any change. Most of the time, if she waits a few minutes and goes back, it fires right up like normal and drives away perfectly fine Some times all she has to do is try again after a second or two and it works fine. It gives NO trouble while it's running, with no stumbling or hesitation, and it sips gas as delicately as it ever has since we changed the O2 sensor. Plus it accelerates like crazy!

The once or twice that it's happened near our home, I was able to get a timing light on the coil wire and got nothing. There was power at the positive side of the coil but no dwell at the negative side. I unplugged the ignition amplifier and when I plugged it back in, the car started. I'm not too excited, 'cause I've unplugged LOTS of things on this car and when they were plugged back in, the car started up again. The lack of spark during cranking tells me something, though.

Again, when it starts up after the no-start problem, it starts just like it normally does - 1/2 second of cranking and boom. No smoke, no stumble, no drama at all, and certainly nothing noticable once under way. I'm getting no error codes from the OBDII reader I borrowed, so I guess it's down to random component replacement unless something fails permanently.

That is, unless someone has another idea...