yesterday i was sitting in my car (the 1.8), just started it up for the first time - playing with the radio and all of a sudden the idle goes to nothing and fluctuates around 0-100 rpm, trying to stall out.

eventually it does stall and i'm thinking WTF??? i can hear the left side cooling fan going berserk so i try and start it again - same thing - stall, fan thrashing away.

i've seen a lot of car problems so i panicked cos this is a new one on me.

easy to figure out that its stalling because its going full rich (cough, cough - smokey) but why is the fan always on?

i thought maybe the temperature sensor had died so the PCM was protecting the engine (with the fan and more fuel) but the sensor checked out fine. so did the fan relay, the PCV system blah, blah, blah etc.........

i looked around this forum for help and the "other" forum as well - but no answers.

i thought for sure that the computer would have thrown an error but it hadn't. this should probably have given me my answer right there but i've never seen a computer fail before so it never occured to me.

i took it to the dealer first thing this morning and i know everyone knows how it feels to have their baby broken so i was pissed off all day (mostly cos i couldn't figure it out myself).

in short, they replaced the computer and its all good again. actually they replaced it with the pcm from a new zealand model, not jdm. it feels to me that there may be some subtle differences in the settings because it feels a little stronger off the mark now although its probably lowered my red line and fuel cut 500 rpm .
could be just imagining it but i would think there are some atmosphere related settings which could be different here in nz.

anyway, just thought i'd post here for the record in case anyone ever has symptoms like these in the future.