bennecc,
It is very rare for the stator to fail. Usually, a misdiagnosis leads one to think it is defective.
One of the most common misdiagnosis is to check for infinity between the white wires and ground and read some value other than infinity. That is because the common center of the three windings are connected together to the yellow wire, which then goes to the safety relay and to ground through the relay coil, so you are actually reading the resistance of the safety relay coil. The answer is to disconnect the yellow wire when doing the resistance reading from each white wire to ground. The yellow wire is separate from the connector that has the three white wires in it, but people assume that if they have unplugged the stator, that it is in fact disconnected, but the yellow wire remains connected.
The other common mistake when measuring the resistance from one white wire to the others is to get a reading greater than 1 Ohm when you are expecting less than 1 Ohm. This is caused by the fact that when trying to measure a very low resistance, you must take into consideration the resistance of the meter test leads themselves and subtract this resistance from your reading. Do this by shorting the test leads together and note the reading, which is typically 0.3 Ohms, so if you read 1.2 Ohms across the white wires, subtract 0.3 to get the real resistance of 0.9 Ohms.
To make matters worse, some meters, especially the less expensive ones, have cheap brass or copper contacts in their range selection switch which can introduce even higher resistance, like 1 or 2 Ohms, into the reading, so it's a good idea to turn the selector switch back and forth a few times to ensure good contact in the switch, then measure the test lead resistance and subtract that from your reading.
The other common mistake is to use too high a range on the Ohm meter. Use the lowest range, which is typically 200 Ohms. If your meter does not have a 200 Ohm or lower range, then get another meter.
Reading such low resistance is always problematic, so what you are really looking for is that all three readings are the same.
Also, some manuals will say that you should read 0.45 Ohms between the white wires. 0.45 Ohms is the resistance for each of the three stator windings. When you measure from one white wire to another, you are actually measuring two of the three windings in series, so the correct resistance will be 0.45 + 0.45 = 0.9 Ohms. If you want to measure the resistance of each winding, then measure between the white wire and the yellow wire, because the yellow wire is common to the other end of each of the white wires.
