Vibration.....Argh

[mikes123]

Ok, this is another thread about thrust arms among the thousands on here, but I have thrown so much money and blood, sweat, and tears on my X lately I just want to make sure that this is the cause. Some of you have probably already seen my bad luck thread but wanted to tag this thread new to focus on this issue. I bought my X5 4.8is back in August (05 with 80k miles). I noticed it had vibrations when I bought it, but I saw where it was inspected by BMW and they said it needed new front tires and front brakes. Also found in the PPI the one of the driver's side motor bracket was broken which was another source of vibration. I replaced the front tires first and it did help but did not go away. Last month I was driving it and noticed a really bad vibration under acceleration. Looked under and saw that the two inner boots on both front axles were torn. Looked like the driver's side axle had some play too. So I replaced them with GKN axles. While I had them out I decided to tackle the motor mounts and that bad bracket (that was fun, had to drop the entire subframe ). Also replaced the front brakes with Stoptech drilled rotors (rears were drilled too from PO so I just decided to match) and EBC red stuff pads.

After that the X5 was much smoother but this is the issues I am having now:

-After 50 mph I am getting significant vibration. It appears to mellow out a little past 75 mph. It's bad enough I can see my passenger seat vibrating like someone stuck a quarter in it. I did notice while my wife was driving home last night that I could feel the vibration in the floor and in the seat even worse than I did the driver's seat. You feel it in the steering wheel but doesn't really shake it (it does some at 50 mph but that goes away but you still feel a vibration.)

-Once I noticed when I was testing it under high speed hard braking that the steering wheel shook violently, it felt like the steering column wasn't attached. But haven't really been able to repeat that every time.

-Coming home today, I could turn the steering wheel slightly in both directions and could feel a slight popping.

-I did get underneath the car and wiggled the thrust arm, and it did have some play in it, but since it's a rubber bushing, won't it flex a little anyways?

So could all these issues be caused by the thrust arm bushings? When I got the PPI done, the tech thought they looked newer and had been replaced recently, but it seems a lot of the symptoms I have correspond to bad bushings. I also went and got all 4 tires re-balanced today but that did not seem to help. I am just curious if all of this could be caused by bad bushings or if I need to look at other items as well. I guess I just need to replace them and see. Just tired of throwing money at it especially since I am having transmission troubles as well.