Mine sure is not spraying anything. It gets electrical as expected during starting/cranking but no fuel comes out: not a spray, not a drop, nothing. I can cold-start my bus using QuickStart fluid sprayed into the air intake behind the air filter (time-consuming, tricky timing and a little dangerous) or by disconnecting the electrical connection to the AFM and after starting the engine and it has run for about a minute I can reconnect that cable and head off but both these ways are little cumbersome (and the AFM disconnect trick likely would not work in really cold weather, I suspect).
All the usual places seem to out of stock on this item so I'm hoping there are some for sale out there, even used (assuming it works) is fine. Note: I believe the same cold start valves work in any of the 1970's FI bus engines so if yours is not 1978, I'm fine with that. Probably even the 80-83 Air Cooled vanagon/westy engines used the same one (but I'm not 100% certain of that).
Thanks for the help!
-George