Sorry for the long rant...
Mine's really beginning to pi$$ me off too. I take great care of this thing and it still wants to crap on me. My idler and tensioner are starting to act up now. I'm getting the "squeak...squeak...squeak...squeak" now and I popped the hood and the tensioner is bouncing all over the place. The bearings are starting to sound bad on the idler too. I get this funny sound from the trans at around 1700 RPM that sounds like a shield rattle, but I know it's not. It's been doing that since it had 40,000 miles but it's getting worse. It does it at idle now when it's cold. It's still shifting fine and all. I am also getting what sounds like some trans pump noise when it's hot, it sounds like a noisy power steering pump, but it's not as bad and it's not the power steering. It's got this funny little shake at idle when I'm in gear at a light or stuck in traffic and it gets worse the longer I sit with my foot on the brake. It feels like a small mis-fire and new plugs didn't fix it. I heard that I should think about changing my water pump a few weeks ago too. The alternator whine on AM stations is getting unbearable, but sometimes it goes away. When I plug in my Nextel charger in the secondary power outlet, it goes away some (figure that one out).
There are countless other things that have gone wrong over the last few weeks and I just don't have the money to keep dumping into this thing. It only has 75,000 miles, what is this thing going to be like as I get closer to 100,000? I still have 3 years of payments left on this thing. My buddy is trying to get rid of his Neon to take over payments on this and I can finally get my Saturn to toy around with. At least with that thing gas is cheaper, I can get parts cheap, and will still have money to beef it up. I don't care if it's smaller, louder, not as smooth, etc. At least I know it will run forever, I won't have to worry about this POS autotragic trans, and I can do more to it. My sister-in-law has a 95' Satty she bought new and it now has 110,000 miles and has never had to do anything major to it. My Taurus has 75,000 and I'm starting to feel like it's going to need a ground up rebuild before 110,000 miles. My Contour was the same way. 107,000 miles and all hell broke loose. My Escort also started acting up at 107,000 miles.
Sorry guys, but over the last couple of weeks, I have completely lost faith in my Taurus. I have been a Taurus lover for years, but after the problems my parents had with their 93' SHO (which I thought they had a lemon) and now mine is suddenly getting all of these problems, I will just be glad to get rid of it. And from the sounds of it, I'm not the first to experience this. It sounds like I am part of the masses that are starting to have issues with their Bulls, not the few that never have issues. I am starting to think I was wrong about that guy with the bitchy website...Maybe he had a good point.