Rough running

[Anthonyboy]

I have a 1996 Nissan Altima GXE with 208,000 miles on it. It is an automatic transmission. I bought the car with about 64,000 miles on it and I haven't really done anything with the engine other than normal maintenance and tune up stuff. I am experiencing some problems with the way that it is running. I just put a thermostat in it the other day and then washed part of the engine off after that. It seemed to run fine on my fifteen minute drive home that night but then the next day it was cutting out on me when I would try to accelerate from a stop. It seemed like once I got going it was running fine. Every time I came to a stop though it would run rough and act like it was going to die when I went to take off. I felt the car sit for a couple of hours and then went to drive it again and then it would run rough pretty much all the time and it wouldn't shift gears until somewhere between 4 and five thousand rpm. I have experience a problem like this before and found that I had gotten water into the distributor cap so I took that all apart and cleaned it all out with electrical cleaner and installed a new distributor cap and rotor. That didn't seem to do any good. I also replaced the fuel filter but that didn't seem to help either. I checked the vacuum by taking the line off of the fuel regulator and I had about 19 inches of vacuum. I would appreciate any advice you could give me.ThanksAnthony

[driftingmy240sx]

check for the intake gasket leak. spray carb cleaner where the head and intake manifold meet and see if the rpm's change. normally they leak at cylinder 4. you may have also gotten water down in the spark plug tubes.