At first I thought this might be a reference to The Cat Joke (which has sort of a cat failure at the end) but I now see it is unrelated.
Given the low idle, the smell of fuel, the poor acceleration and that red exhaust, it would seem the bike is passing a lot of raw fuel through the exhaust. The most likely culprit is a cylinder spark failure (coil, plug or primary wiring) but it is confusing because you say all the exhaust pipes are the same temperature. ?? Perhaps you have a 'sort of' failed spark plug that works at higher RPM but not idle and the pipes were all warm from actually riding the bike? It would seem at idle at least one cylinder is not firing. Perhaps another test just starting the bike and letting it idle while you note the temperature of each header pipe to see if one does not get warm, or does not get warm nearly as fast as the others.
My best Internet guess would be one cylinder has partial or full spark failure. You should be able to find which cylinder doing the above idle / header pipe test and then you can swap that coil with another one and see if the problem moves to the other cylinder or not.
It is a fair amount of work (several hours at least) to get to the spark plug coils and / or the spark plugs. Unfortunately it does sound like you will have to do that (or have a shop do it) to diagnose the problem. Best of luck and let us know what you find.
Brian
The Bike: 2009 C14
17776 miles
stock except for k&N air filter
Leaving work this afternoon I go out to my bike and start it. It starts but is idling really low about 900-1000 rpm. The exhaust sounded like it had a leak and smelled really rich. Luckily I have a very short commute (depending on how I feel 3 miles to 15 miles) home so I take off. The bike strains to accelerate granted I wasn't trying to accelerate that fast. I get home and leave the bike running so I can examine it. At first I figured maybe a spark plug had gone bad and I had a dead cylinder. I touch all of the head pipes and all were the same temperature and none of them were discolored in any way. As I was kneeling on the right side of the bike a caught a glimpse of something underneath the bike. And there it was the left bank cats were glowing red. I shut the bike down and let it cool. I wanted to see if it would do it again if I started it back up and let it idle. Sure enough after 5 minutes it was red hot again. I'm pretty certain that that particular cat is clogged. I am going to pop the muffler off and shine a flash light in there to see if I can see anything. The pics below are the cats cooled down and then the cats as the bike idles for 5 minutes.
More updates to follow.
