Suddenly my hood does not latch when I close it. The cable seems to be ok, the only thing I can think of is that the latch itself is a bit off (although I have no idea how this happened). It's the one thing I really can't find on YouTube and chilton and the shop manual really are not any help.

Wanna know the kicker here? When I had the car running and just dropped the hood to see if it would latch, the car died! What I found out from doing this a couple of times was that there were sparks coming from the latch as the metal pieces hit each other. This caused the car do die.

 

Sounds like the mechanism is stuck shut? WD-40? If you suspect misalignment then use a grease pen or maybe a crayon might work to see where they are hitting each other at. mark up the hood latch pieces and when you try to shut it will mark the bottom where it is hitting.