well 1st off, don't think it's electrical.

I'd clean the carb 1st, either take it off and do it right or be lazy and drain the carb then fill it back up with seafoam, let it sit overnite, then drain it again and fill up with fresh gas.

Hey, wow, thanks for the quick reply.  About a month ago I drained all the gas, put some in and added seafoam.  Let it run a while, around the block or two, but never got really got a huge amount of white smoke.  I've done this on cars, but directly in via vaccum, and gotten way more smoke before.  

What makes me think it's electrical is that shouldn't my tester light up on the plug wire when trying to start it?   I don't understand why black has constant light when bike turned on, but orange only has a light when trying to start.  I'm thinking that current is getting in and out the coil (and I've used 3), but not coming down the plug wire.  Am I understanding this wrong?  I didn't pull the plug, cause that would mean taking off tank, when I thought I could see if plug was getting a spark off the plug wire.

seafoam don't burn to well that's why it clouded up on your car.

I'm not the electrical guru, but i think the coil has electricity to it all the time, and discharges thru the orange wire to spark.  would be easier to check with the plug and checking spark.

I'm pretty sure it operates backwards to the way cars used to operate.
it grounds the coil to cause spark.  I would'nt go to far into it with out checking the spark first, and you may need a new sparkplug.

I'm sure you are not the only one who has problems with electrical stuff. Ths Savage does not have a Capacitive Discharge Ignition (CDI) system. It has a transistorized system. The box which controls the ignition is called the "ignitor" in the Clymer book. According to Clymer, the coil has power supplied via the orange wire at all times when the ignition is on. This current comes through the engine stop switch on the handlebar and through the sidestand relay. The black wire goes to the ignitor. The ignitor switches the coil on or off, in just exactly the same way as points switched coils on older machines.

The pickup coil is mounted inside the stator cover. Whenever a magnet mounted on the rotor (what I would have called a flywheel) passes the pickup coil it induces a pulse, which is wired to the ignitor. The ignitor receives the pulse, mulls things over, then switches the coil to make a spark. No current comes down the plug boot wire until the ignitor calls for a spark, and then the current is quite small (but the voltage is quite high).

If you aren't getting 12 volts on the orange wire at the coil when the ignition is on, you need to start backtracking to find out what happened. By the way, it looks as if it might be an orange wire with a white tracer on it. Make sure the stop switch on the right handlebar isn't off. Try it with the sidestand up. I don't advise riding with the sidestand switch bypassed, but you can easily bypass it for troubleshooting.

Let us know what happens.

Okay, I'm armed with a new DMM and after finding some food, with the help of chapter 8, electrical of the clymer manual, I'll come up with some numbers for various things.  I'm really starting to think it might be the starter motor.  One of the times I was trying to start it, while my old battery was low, I had the charger on "engine assist" and think it might have fried the starter motor.  Sound plausible?  Any any idea where to get maybe a used one?  Didn't see any on ebay, and new is $300+.  

Btw, what's the $$ ratio on selling bike running versus parting it out?  I'm not likely to put another 300 into it.  It's very clean, 1765 original miles and has custom paint and new seats.

I get nasty vibes from a battery charger on "engine assist." I would be very suspicious that the charger put out considerably higher voltage than the normal battery voltage. I would suspect, if it did, the high voltage could have fried the ignitor module, the voltage regulator, and the decompression controller. I would check the output voltage of that battery charger on "engine assist" using that new DMM. If it puts out more than, say, 16 volts (a guess) it might have killed all the solid-state electronics on the bike.