Hey,

this is unrelated to your problems but I just thought it was interesting that we both recently bought crossfires and we are coming from manual cabrios (mine was a 1997 with nearly 200k on the odometer). The sloppy shifter problem can be taken care of by polyurethane bushings... Once I did that my cabrio shifts better then the crossfire. The cabrio actually had a few features I missed when switching to the xfire... But I still own the vw.