PLA at ABS temp and a smoking extruder

I bought a Printrbot LC recently and I've printed out a handful of things with it, but the quality was never great. The problem is the filament isn't extruding well. A lot of times nothing come out during the skirt and first few layers, or it comes out in spurts. I was thinking the problem might be the temperature I was using was too low, although I was printing at 192C as recommended by the person I bought the printer from. I was going to try 200C, but then I thought that maybe I had grabbed a reel of ABS instead of PLA by accident so I thought I'd try printing at ABS temp quick (230C) and see if that did it. Was I asking for trouble extruding PLA at 230c? I thought at worst it would ooze out too fast, but instead the extruder started smoking and now I'm unable to print anything at all. Is the extruder toast or is there something i can do to clean it up? I am able to extrude filament fine it's just when i try to print something Pronterface goes into a never-ending countdown, repeating W:5 over and over. Can anyone tell me what that means? I'll get the exact output Pronterface is displaying as soon as I'm back at home. If anyone can help, thanks!

Your extruder should be fine - after all its designed to heat to those temps. The smoking was probably the PLA burning. You then said that you were able to extrude filament fine which seems to suggest you don't have any blockage. I don't know what W:5 is but when someone enlightens us maybe we can address the problem. Find out the full error message and post..

Alright so when I click print it homes all the axes, then displays temp info like this for a while, which is normal:

T:199.52 E:0 B:70.88
T:199.52 E:0 B:71.04
T:199.52 E:0 B:71.22
etc..

but then when it gets to the countdown, it continually stays at W:5, whereas normally it would countdown to W:0 and then put out W: ? for a few seconds and begin. Instead this is what it's outputting:

T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.65 E:0 W:5
T:205.88 E:0 W:5
T:205.94 E:0 W:5
T:206.34 E:0 W:5
T:206.34 E:0 W:5
T:206.34 E:0 W:5
T:206.34 E:0 W:5
T:206.16 E:0 W:5
T:205.88 E:0 W:5
T:205.88 E:0 W:5
T:205.88 E:0 W:5
T:205.85 E:0 W:5
T:205.65 E:0 W:5
T:205.45 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.37 E:0 W:5
T:205.31 E:0 W:5
T:205.11 E:0 W:5
T:205.06 E:0 W:5
T:199.55 E:0 W:4
T:199.52 E:0 W:3
T:205.06 E:0 W:5
T:205.40 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.45 E:0 W:5

You can see at one point it starts the countdown, but then goes right back to W:5. Strangely, it continues even if I pause it. I have to hit Disconnect to get it to stop outputting. Stranger still, if I then click Connect again, it continues to output W:5s...

T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
Paused.
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5

...

T:205.37 E:0 W:5
Disconnected.
Connecting...
T:205.40 E:0 W:5
Printer is now online.
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.43 E:0 W:5
T:205.40 E:0 W:5
T:205.40 E:0 W:5
T:205.40 E:0 W:5
T:205.40 E:0 W:5
Disconnected.

Looking at it some more, I noticed that the times it goes into countdown properly the temp is lower than the temp I set it to (199.xx in the example I gave above, when it was set to 200), but then it jumps right back up to 205.xx. That can't be right can it? A drop of 6 degrees for two seconds and then right back up. Could it be that the temperature sensor for the extruder (a thermistor?) is malfunctioning and giving out overly hot readings? If so, how would one go about repairing it?