On my Raider 3.0 one time just died. I had fire, gas, air, it would not run. I checked the timing, good. I tried another cap and rotor, coil, all kinds of stuff from the my Montero. I had a distributer from a junk yard and it worked fine. I guess it was the electronics in the distributer.

When you connected and grounded the sparkplug was it a orange/yellow (weak spark)spark or bright blue spark (strong spark). That got me with a honda one time. I was getting fire and it would not run. I could not figure out why. A new cap and rotor and it had a much stronger spark and ran fine. Just a possibility.

Check engine light on?