My transmission seems to have developed a problem. In the beginning, perhaps a thousand miles ago ( I've not had the car very long, but thats a lotta miles!), the transmission shifted smoothly and beautifully, just like it should. Perhaps 400 miles ago, the shifting only felt smooth at low throttle and at full throttle (maybe I just wanted rough full-throttle shifts, though); at around 3/4 throttle the shifts felt quite rough. Now, every shift the transmission makes feels quite rough and uncivilised. It moves far too eagerly from one gear to the next, as if it were racing, even when I'm moving like a bloody turtle! And, when setting off from a standstill, the transition from still to moving has that same clunkiness to it.

I've checked my ATF and there is, indeed, enough, despite the Wal-Mart boys' complaints that the car leaks (I notice neither puddles nor low fluid levels), though I have no idea whether the fluid looks good or bad. I have, once or twice, put the transmission in neutral and killed the engine to coast up to a parking space in absolute silence (before I discovered I shouldn't do that, ever), and for a while I had a habit of putting it in neutral and coasting along the motorway, then rev-matching back into Drive to get going again (got damn good, too). I also, at long stoplights, like to put it in neutral and engage the handbrake to relieve the disc brakes and brakelights.

I hope I've provided enough detail to properly ask: What's going wrong with my tranny? Is it fixable, or at what cost? Is it stoppable? Is my driving exasperating it?

Any help or feedback at all would be genuinely appreciated. I'd hate to learn later that there was something I could have done.