Ok, today i was on my way to my gfs house, which is about an hours drive. Well half way there i get stuck in traffic and i have to sit for a bit. When i actually stopped, i noticed that my idle was sitting right at 2k rpms..this is not normal. Ive been having a shitty time with hesitation lately and as soon as i saw the rpms sitting there i figured that this is my problem. It has to be an intake air leak of some sort. The only things ive done are remove the throttle body and upper intake manifold in the past week, so it has to be one of these causing the problem. I made sure to tighten everything down when i put it back together but i guess it wasnt enough. And no, i didnt replace the gaskets when i did the work. Can i go back and use rtv to seal everything up? Is there something else i can check vaccum wise? Also, my air fuel gauge is reading lean, so i has to be a leak thats undetected, causing the leanness and hesitation right?? Any help is appreciated

Edit: The hesitation was extremely bad today, my car started to backfire about 45 minutes into the drive while accelerating under 4k rpms. What does this mean?

usually you can hear vacuum leaks. especially the huge ones. take off the vacuum line that connects to the top of the throttle body sometime, the thing with PSHHHHHHT like no other.

usually whenever i take anything apart that has a gasket i will replace it with a new one. it's just good pratice. some gaskets are designed to be pressed into place only once - after that if you try to put whatever it was back together it will simply not seal the way it used to.

its not a good idea to use RTV on the intake manifold and TB. Gas will break down the RTV and you'll end up loosing the seal.

Well my problem and a vaccum leak just makes sense. I dont know what else to look for and i really dont hear any hissing. Im going to check some seals on sunday to make sure everything is cool. I'll let you know