My week has been plagued by car problems. I drive a terrible old V6 Firebird, build long after after the classic Firebirds were gone, when it was nothing more than a knockoff Camaro with a different name. It's had no problems in the last few months of course. My wife drives a '09 Corolla. She's been driving it a few years, but we only got around to buying it from my father-in-law this summer. So now it developed problems. Last week a bearing went bad on the alternator, that was pretty easy to diagnose, and obvious when the alternator was off -- turn the pulley and it made a nasty crunch. But occasionally from a cold start, it idles slowly, sounds like it's going to stall out our something, but then after a couple seconds, it idles normally and shows no more symptoms. And also occasionally at a cold start it has a fairly loud rattle, again for only about a second, and then no more symptoms. My father law was pretty sure this was a starter going bad -- odd idle sounds from the starter gear not retracting right way, and rattle from the gear not retracting completely and remaining in partial contact for another second. So we replaced the starter, and the sounds went away for 24 hours, and then came back with no change whatsoever. So now I have no clue about the weird idle sounds, and I'm starting to think the rattle might be this: