HELP with my new Alfa!!

[Brian Kennedy <bekn8xlt@domain.elided>]

Hello everyone, 

I just signed up for the Alfa Digest.  I'm the not-proud owner of a 'new'
91 Spider Veloce.  I say not-proud because I just bought the car yesterday
and already have two major problems.  I have owned one Spider before and
have been looking for months.  I've learned alot about Spiders and thought
I'd found a good one.

If anyone has any advice whatsoever on these two problems I'm all ears.
Please help!  Here are the details:

I drove the car home from Canton, Ohio where I bought it from a private
owner; around 150 miles with no problems whatsoever.  I spent a couple of
hours cleaning the interior of the car and put it in the garage.  This
morning when I started it up, the entire instrument panel (every electronic
gauge) was dead and the battery light was on!  Driving the car and repeated
turning on/off of the engine did no good.  I found fuse #7 blown and
replaced it.  Curiously, the owners manual says this should be a 7.5 amp
fuse but there was a 20 amp one there.  After replacing with another 20 amp
(just to be safe in case the manual was wrong) I started the car and the
instrument panel was still dead.  As soon as I revved the engine, pop, the
fuse blew again.  

I'm devastated by this considering how much I just spent on this car and
just wanted to run this by as many Alfa people as I know to see if this
might be some kind of common or a simple problem.  My first thought was
that the voltage regulator on the alternator (I'm assuming that there is
one) might be bad, but then why is only one fuse blowing?  If no one has
heard of this then I guess my new baby has to go right into the nearest
Alfa shop (Mike's Foreign Car Service in Columbus, Ohio).

The other problem is that the passenger's floor was wet with an inch of
water after the trip.  The car has a hard top and I drove it home with the
hard top on (no other way to get it home), so naturally I had the A/C on
the whole trip.  Under the right dash there is what looks like maybe the
A/C evaporator??  There is a drain tube type protrusion coming from just
north of that and that's where the water was dripping profusely.  I can
only hope this is an A/C related problem and that maybe there is a drain
tube cap missing or something simple like that.

Anyone have any ideas?

Sincerely,
Brian Kennedy
Westerville, OH
614-794-9470
bekn8xlt@domain.elided

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