Ok, here's 4 pics. See if you can figure out why it was vibrating so bad...among other things.

these are from my upper control arms.

 

Wow.
How many miles are on it to get that kinda play?

 

oh it's not the miles for the play...it's why the play was happnenin!!

Notice...one 12mm bushing sleeve. one 14mm bushing sleeve. the 14mm sleeve belonged in my LOWER control arms. i replaced those in april, and one of those was MISSING the sleeve. So basically. one of my lowers was missing a sleeve. the lower sleeve was in the upper, and i was actually missing a correct upper sleeve that wasnt in the car at all. thus allowing my control arms to not be real stable...and let the rear end shift. A LOT! I'm thinking it also had something to do with damaging a u-joint in my driveshaft...hence the new aluminum one. My gears are leaking oil. I wont know how bad til Tuesday. But im pretty much gonna have to replace my gears & pinion seal pretty quick anyhow.

 

Ouch, thats bad.

They should have never screwed that up. I know things like this have happened before though, in on the 99+ body style, ford swapped to the 14mm bushing/bolts on the LCA's only and kept the 12mm on UCA, why I dont know. On my 00GT I had first, i ordered a set of LCA's and they sent me 94-98 ones, 12mm, yeah they wouldnt fit and thats how/when I found out about the nice discrete change Ford had made.

You are probably right in the fact it had something to do with damaging your u-joints, especially since you tracked your car quite a bit. All that sudden shock and having mm's of play in the suspension couldnt have been good for it.

 

oh yeah?....I just put new tires on my focus, and I thought they were wearing pretty fast...I only had 30,000 miles on them......turns out, my left rear was a different size than the other three! Dealership did it before I bought it....and I never new.....it drove fine though,,,,tires just were trash after 30k. I couldnt believe it.