[THEFERMANATOR]

One compressor 2 evaporators, and the evaporator's rarely fail. Sounds to me like you've getting screwed on prices of repairs. I know good mechanics are hard to find though. For the U-joints, a driveshaft shop is the ONLY option. The driveshaft will need to be rebalnced as GM glued the original U-joints in place, the replacements will not be centered like the originals and will vibrate if you do just the joints. That normally runs about $80-$100 down here where I am. The 2 steering arms that go bad are the idler and pitman, those 2 arms with the idler bracket normally cost me $65 at autozone, and it pays about 2.5 hours book time to do them(so if your guy charges $80 an hour that's $200). An alignment shouldn't cost more than $80. As for the oil leak at the manifold, that one I would question. The only place it could be leaking is at the end gaskets, but those are silicone and rarely leak enough to notice. The intake gaskets do fail and leak coolant, but never seen many oil leaks up there.

It looks like I have been screwing myself as I normally do the front end stuff for people for under $150 and they have to take it in for an alignment afterwards if it needs it. Most of the time they don't need one though. I personally would have him point out the intake leak as that one sounds fishy to me. As for the steering, the idler and pitman are the weak link in ALL of the GM front end's and tend to fail at 125K miles or so. The compressors on em are a piss poor design, but there are revised ones that don't fail that often(SANDEN makes one, GM and the major parts stores still sell the POS one).