To bring everyone up to date, I have recently bought back my 96 Accord for a little of nothing with a possible bad transmission. I sold the car to a friend of the family a little over two years ago with just under 170,000 miles. I had owned the car since it had only 45,000 miles. The odometer currently reads 205,210. I kept the car fully maintained by the book and never had any problems with it whatsoever during the entire time I owned it. I changed the ATF fluid every 30k miles with Honda ATF only. The car was in tip top shape when I sold it, I even drove it 700 miles to New Orleans to deliver it to him. According to the owner, he has only had to replace the starter @ around 180k (which was original) and he had just recently had a new set of tires and brake pads installed. The CEL came on at 200k miles and the heat shield does rattle between 1500-2000 rpms. Otherwise, the car has had no issues until he was driving to school one morning last month (he lives in New Orleans and goes to school in Baton Rouge which is a 65 mile one way trip) when all of a sudden the car came out of gear and acted as if it were in neutral. He said the engine would just rev freely and the car wouldn't go. He pulled off of the highway and called for a tow truck to tow it back to the house. About two weeks later he got in it to try and move it from the street to the side of his house. He put it in gear and it responded and he was able to drive it forward around the house. He hasn't driven the car since then. Assuming that the transmission was shot, he decided to buy a new car (2008 Sentra) and called to ask me if I wanted to buy the car back for cheap. I accepted. So the car is currently sitting in my sister's backyard in New Orleans awaiting me to go pick it up pretty soon. My sister is a service advisor at a Honda dealership in New Orleans and has a tech. who would be willing to put a tranny in it on his own time (for a quoted price between $800-$1200) so that I could drive the car home. Otherwise, I'll just tow it down (I'm in Orlando, btw)

Do the symptoms spell a dead transmission? I asked him if he noticed any prior problems with shifting, etc. and he said not at all. This just happened out of nowhere. Has this happened to anyone else? I did later think about the possibility of low fluid (as the result of a busted line, gasket, etc.) but it didn't hit me to check the fluid level while I was in New Orleans. Ditto for a flashing D4 light... but I can have my sister check both. According to her, the car did move to and from the car dolly on it's own, so the transmission does engage for those short moves. She hasn't attempted to take the car on the road. When it left the owner on I-10, he said he had been driving it for about 15 minutes at 70 mph before it acted up. Any ideas?