My son's 1997 had a few problems that he had been dealing with, and over the last few days we fixed them all. At first it looked like a lot of $$$ would be needed to do it but in the end the cost was time and a few dollars.
1) First problem was the gas cap filler door would not open. He thought it was a problem with the latch and cable release. The fix that worked was to remove the door, lubricate first with WD-40 and get the door to operate smoothly on the hinge, then use 3-in-1 oil on the hinge once it was working freely. Reinstalled the door, lined it up properly, and then adjusted the spring that pops it open. Total cost was $0 and about 1 hours time.2) Second problem was the noise coming from the blower motor - seemed like it would be a bad motor bearing - turned out the problem all along was a peach pit in the squirrel cage fan that made a lot of noise. The noise problem was there since day one (bought used in 2002) so the peach pit was either in there from the factory or put there by the previous owner or someone playing a joke. We kept the peach pit as a souvenir. Cost to fix $0 and a few hours labor. The hardest part was getting the glovebox door off.
3) Third problem was no air conditioning. At first we thought it needed a recharge and bought a kit. My son said he remembered it stopped working rather abruptly last summer. When we got home with the kit we looked at it with the engine running. With the A/C on the clutch was not running. We check the fuse under the dash and it was OK. Under the hood was another fuse compartment - there was a fuse for the A/C there too - we took off the cover and pulled the A/C fuse. It fell apart. one of the legs stayed in the fusebox and the plastic section with the other leg did come out. After disconnecting the battery (maybe shoulda done that first) we were able to get that broken off piece out of there. I noticed a greenish coloration in that part of the fusebox, though most of the fusebox looked good. It took a lot of manipulating the fuse box itself to get that broken off piece out of there. We cleaned the terminal the best we could and installed a new fuse - A/C was working good when he left a few minutes ago. The root cause seems to be the battery positive terminal was somewhat corroded and some of the corrosion products seem to have gotten to that fuse. Anyway, we cleaned the battery real good and put everything back together. Total cost was just a few dollars for the fuse and battery terminal cleaner.The results for my son are priceless !!
Anyway sometimes repairs go well this was one of those times.
Mark