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I see this topic come up alot and I myself have long suffered with a bad idle. Since I have now solved my problem I figured I would post this up so that others may benefit from my 6 month quest.
At first my idle was just rough/bouncy. After a thorough carb cleaning, new plugs, etc the idle was somewhat smoother but would tend to "hang" (when coming to a stop light the bike would idle at 3k for about 20 seconds before slowly dropping down to 1200). I adjusted the valves and achieved only minor improvement. Eventually I shifted focus to the air box and noticed that the sealant around the boots was all dried out. I pulled out all the boots, cleaned everything up real good with naptha, and reinstalled the boots with a liberal application of high temperature RTV (while I was at it I applied RTV to the seam between the two halves of the airbox). When installing the aribox to the carbs I double and triple checked that the boot was sealing all the way around the carb opening. In particular the center-facing portions of boots 2+3 didn't seem to want to go all the way on. I pulled out the air filter so I could reach inside and really pushed the boots onto the carbs while I tightened down the screws. A quick re-synch of the carbs and all was well.
In summary, if you have idle problems:
replace spark plugs
rebuild carbs and set the pilot jets 2.5 turns out
adjust valves
reseal boots to the airbox
make doubly sure that the boots seal all around the carb inlets
synch the carbs
At first my idle was just rough/bouncy. After a thorough carb cleaning, new plugs, etc the idle was somewhat smoother but would tend to "hang" (when coming to a stop light the bike would idle at 3k for about 20 seconds before slowly dropping down to 1200). I adjusted the valves and achieved only minor improvement. Eventually I shifted focus to the air box and noticed that the sealant around the boots was all dried out. I pulled out all the boots, cleaned everything up real good with naptha, and reinstalled the boots with a liberal application of high temperature RTV (while I was at it I applied RTV to the seam between the two halves of the airbox). When installing the aribox to the carbs I double and triple checked that the boot was sealing all the way around the carb opening. In particular the center-facing portions of boots 2+3 didn't seem to want to go all the way on. I pulled out the air filter so I could reach inside and really pushed the boots onto the carbs while I tightened down the screws. A quick re-synch of the carbs and all was well.
In summary, if you have idle problems:
replace spark plugs
rebuild carbs and set the pilot jets 2.5 turns out
adjust valves
reseal boots to the airbox
make doubly sure that the boots seal all around the carb inlets
synch the carbs
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