Update: After having my rattling 2008 Rogue tranny replaced 2000 km ago, I couldn't be happier. The tranny performs flawlessly, is smooth as can be, I get great gas mileage and lots of power, and best of all no noise - it is completely silent. My conclusion after all of this is that the CVT should be silent, if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are either misinformed or lying to you. My original tranny started getting noisy quite soon after I bought it and it got prgressively worse, and I think the performace was going downhill too. My dealer replaced with no questions asked, stated that this was the only course of action and that the noise was a sign of internal failure - just one of those unlucky bad parts which affect all vehicle manufacturers. So the new CVT is great and I would encourage anyone with CVT noise to insist that the problem be addressed by your service department, because it is an indicator of internal failure, and this is an expensive fix that you don't want to incur after warranty expires. The good news is the defective ones always seem to show up early, so if you don't hear a noise I'm sure you'll have nothing to worry about a decade or more into the future.