White smoke and stutters after cold start

Thor1950 said:

Hope you get feeling better soon. But your advice on glow plugs goes against everything that is in print, and what the manufactures say. So i guess people like Bosch are full of **** and you are correct

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No,not at all and the latest glows are so quick in heating there is no doubt they make a difference to cold starting.Any diesel will get away quicker/better with a hot spot in the chamber to initiate combustion. BTW Sierraferry, you will not offend me,I run a LR garage,this quickly makes you very resistant to any snide or cutting comments.You also become a slave to tracing the ever more complex ways that recent LR rubbish finds to fail.
The point I was trying to get across to the OP is that a TD5 engine in good health will start without the help of glow plugs down to temps well below freezing.(Running immediately on 5 and producing no white smoke) Any TD4,5,6,TDV6 or TDV8 LR that comes into my workshop never gets to wait till the glow lamp goes out before I crank it from cold,year round.How well it starts and sounds gives me a good indicator of overall health and a look in the mirror for the colour/amount of smoke tells a good story too.The only time I don't crank immediately is when I want to listen to the behaviour of the electric fuel pump/s,again there is a great deal of diagnostic info to be gained here before hooking up SDD or a scope etc.
I stand by what I said originally,my reasoning being that there is not point in replacing parts that either wont effect a cure or will only mask a deeper problem.With TD5's so many people just get out the parts shotgun and fire parts at them with no real hope of knowing if they are going to work.The number of injectors,fuel pumps,injector washers,pressure regulators I have seen replaced to "repair" a fault,often costing hundreds of pounds,and often of a poorer quality than the non faulty original which is either in the bin or gone back as exchange.
TD5 engines will work hard for a good 300,000m if looked after and nothing nasty is done to them.But when they do go wrong they can be expensive to repair properly,just look through Turner engineerings parts list - which is a very good cost/quality compromise.So diagnose as accurately as possible,look very closely at the symptoms and then try to decide which components are likely to be responsible.Then if possible test them.When you find the faulty part replace it with either genuine or known good OEM part.Its not always easy - I've been doing this job for around 30 years,sometimes you just have to take a leap to move forward,but in this case I think the OP's TD5 should be fairly easy to sort out by someone with the right kit/knowledge.

Get the timing position checked out. I had 100% exactly same problem and it was the timing out which took half and hour and no parts to fix. Worth checking for the little time and cost put into this possible fix. Plus it's one thing that I find never get put forward as a fix.

Hmm, interesting discussion which developed I see whilst I wasn't around

So the glow plugs were changed, but it still smokes a bit until its warm, so clearly that wasn't the issue.

Timing position - excuse my ignorance but can you just explain a bit more? It's just so that when I speak to the garage I can have a clue about what I'm saying...