ok, so georges comment about masking an underlying problem has been ringing in the back of my head and wont go away. i have been running without the a/c since the issues started, and as of late, its been hot, but the car has been behaving for the most part. still runs hotter then it did before, and hotter then i think it should, but far from over heating so i have just been dealing with it. this morning i decided to test it. its was in the low 70's, and overcast. pretty much the same weather where the car was acting perfect before. so instead of running with the windows down i rolled them up and fired up the a/c. to my dismay, the temp was over 200 when i got to work. it would have never climbed past 180 before. so now i know its not a radiator problem. i was able to duplicate the conditions from before where i knew exactly how it ran and acted, and it got hot faster and went to a much higher temp. somethings broke, somewhere somethings not right. i guess its time to tear the damn thing down and see whats going on. i hope it will be readily apparent when i get it apart, this wont happen for a couple weeks when i get back from vacation and have time to screw with it. so if you got any ideas, or something else i could check, please post them. if not, then in a couple weeks im going to be tearing it apart piece by piece hoping to find a faulty gasket but also looking for hairline cracks. its heating like i got a crack or bad gasket regaurdless of the lack of other tell tale signs. so its getting blown apart, wish me luck.