thanks for all the good input.

it is 3 hrs away from me at the dealer, needed other stuff done to it.

anyway, I told them I am not doing heater core.........kyle is the tech and he is thorough. he spent all day today directly flushing the ***** out of the heater core, he said it was puking like hell..........no more gushing sound and he said it is on its way to running clean again.

I told them I want to have it power flushed one more time for good measure.

the hoses actually seem to be in really good shape, it has new rad cap, new t-stat, but here is the deal with the water pump:

works fine, ok yeah that is a good assessment..........well it had a dealer replace t-belt at 60k miles; they didn't replace pump then, just inspected it..........it now has 80k on it, so...

the pump has 80k on it
the t-belt has 20k on it

I don't really want to invest all that money to get water pump replaced since t-belt doesn't need it.

I will have to roll my dice on the pump and hope it lasts another 40k miles.....