Are you running an HEI style distributor in a Ford? 

Knowing what I know about the HEI from years of also owning Chevys I can say that were decent technology in their day, but honestly you'd be just as well off with a divorced coil setup.  In fact the HEI eventually went to a divorced coil setup because packaging it on the back of the engine was hard.  The "magic" in the HEI is that the had a 40,000V coil stock, which you can buy for any other setup too.  The short distance between the coil and the rotor is great in theory, but makes little difference in practice considering the typical resistance of high performance wires.  The pickup coil in the HEI would often fail in 100k mile range, requiring pulling the distributor and taking it apart to fix.  The stock modules were decent up to about 5,500RPM, beyond that they didn't have enough dwell to keep a high reving engine from breaking up. 

Most of that's neither here nor their concerning your problem, just some HEI info in general.  I'd be more concerned with how your distributor failed.  I'm thinking this is heat related, so is oil not getting to the drive gear?  IS the oil pump locked up and the drivehsaft turned into a swizel stick?  I'd figure out what's really wrong before just tossing another distributor in it, unless the failure is quality related in which case that's a tough call because I hear most of the stuff out there now, even the expensive stuff is often junk. 

It's hard to beat a Duraspark distributor and spark box. Rockauto carries good name brands for both and you can pick a harness to connect them up from several places.

They are also easy to find in most any auto parts if you are out on the road when one of them fails.

I've got a MSD dizzy and 6AL in my other car and it's been flawless for 15 years (knock on wood). I was thinking about going with the MSD Ready to Run dizzy for the Mustang to get rid of the box and simplify things a bit. Anyone have one?  Yeah or nea?

I can't comment of the earlier style divorced modules, but the later ones on the EFI cars left a lot to be desired.  Adding typical bolt ons to an EFI Fox body would result in spark scatter above 3,500RPM.  An MSD box or equivalent would solve the issue.  However, I also found that an aftermarket module with increased high RPM dwell time for the coil also solved the problem at a fraction of the cost of the MSD box.  Again, can't comment on the earlier boxes used on carbureted applications, so I'd be curious if those systems had similar issues. 

woodie........might be a good idea to post your address in your avatar hickey to the left!
6sal6

The Ford Duraspark II was used in so many vehicles and years, I'm surprised to hear that you can not get these parts locally or at least with a local order.