Jeff,
I do handle them properly. This oven takes the short ignitor, by the way. The darn things aren't cheap either - around forty bucks apiece. Propane is the fuel.

No "self cleaning" here. This time around, she told me the oven was taking a while to start, and the thing blew the very next day! Usually they would take quite some time fail after becoming slow to start. This problem annoys me!

When the second one failed, I actually measured the current (using a calibrated DMM) drawn by the valve, and it was well within spec. Anything else to check?

Tom