Digital BW, The Print

I recently installed an MIS UT7 CIS in my 1280.  It looked great 
(after some fiddling) for a few days, but now it seems that no matter 
what I do, I get nasty, inconsistent banding.  Nozzle checks are 
really ugly, and if I do manage to get them "clean" before I run too 
many cleaning cycles and have to let it sit, it will only print maybe 
a few inches into the next print before you can see that it is 
starting to drop nozzles again.  The next nozzle check will look 
terrible.

I tried putting some Windex on the waste sponge and letting it sit 
parked for a day and a half, and have re-aligned the heads, but this 
is driving me nuts.  The prints looked fantastic at first, but I've 
had it installed for less than a week and it is virtually unuseable 
now.  I'm tired of wasting ink and paper.

I see on the MIS site that sometimes "foamy ink" may be a culprit, 
and that they recommend sucking a bunch of ink through the cartridge 
to purge the foam.  Anyone tried this with any success?  I'm really 
frustrated...

Eric