Talking about the wife's 97.5 S90...

Tranny has 3 buttons to select shifting pattern, W, S, E. Yes, I know what they are, but I don't know if this model has multiple trannies, so I thought that'd be important ID info...

I'm not real familiar with this car, because the seats are just too damn small for me, so I not only rarely, rarely drive it, I don't even ride in it if it's not necessary... so bear with me in this description.

The lights were flashing on the three buttons on the tranny, so she took it to the only local guy who will even touch a Volvo (the nearest dealer is 175 miles, and that's in Odessa/Midland Texas, where they spell "Volvo" as F-O-R-D; the only one we halfway trust is in Austin, 435 miles away, so... we're kinda stuck with what we got). He went ahead and changed the fluids and filters, and in the midst of that, the lights quit blinking. She said it was fine, and I was good with that.

That happened, I guess three or four weeks ago. No apparent problems since - or none reported, anyway.

So today, she headed off to Austin to take care of some business, and since she's picking up some computer equipment, she took my Suburban (if you're curious, it's a 99 2WD with power everything and has a hair under 200,000 miles on the clock; if you're not curious, that's still what it is). That leaves me with the Volvo. The seat got semi-permanently set about 2/3 of the way back, which makes it extremely uncomfortable for me, but that's life... anyway, when I got in and started off, the engine revved a whole lot higher than I thought it should and kind of slowly slid away from the parking spot - enough so that I first thought I was in neutral, before it started moving. I looked down at the selector buttons - as far as I could tell, it was probably in "W", which isn't too big a surprise, as we had snow and ice (a rarity here) about a week ago, so I could believe she had punched up W and never gone back to S or E. I punched S, and nothing happened. I'm not sure if I was standing still when I did that, because I'm about 50 feet from a 4-Way Stop when I take off from the house, so I may have been stopped, or not. Nothing changed. I drove around the block, busily punching the buttons. They just blinked - without going out to the car and driving it, I'd have to say the blinked back and forth between W and whichever of the other two I'd punched. I drove it about three or four miles out the highway (45 or under) and back, without anything changing. It didn't seem to be laboring or running too high revs, but I didn't get a good look at the tach.

So - before I take it back to the guy (I think he's pretty good - he works on John Ward's race cars, and drives some for him - 911s - so he's not completely incompetent) I was thinking maybe you folks might have some experience with this problem.

Thanks for any ideas anyone might have.