Just as a final postscript and completeness to this thread:
a big shout out thank you to Gary Rogers (aka Lovel) who was the wise engineer who properly inspected and realised that the vehicle vibration problem was from the driveshaft. And then discovered that the tripode joint at the end of the driveshaft was missing its outer ring and the roller bearings for it were not there!! (And not mashed up inside the bearing casing and not fallen onto Gary's garage floor!).
Whilst he and I soon found out that there are different driveshafts for 1.8, 2.0 and 2.5 and also diesel and petrol and also automatic and manual and that Rimmers do not have all variants, the problem was fully solved by Gary sourcing and fitting an identical sized trilobe bearing (also called tripode joint).
A great and satisfying end to a worrying and fraught set of circumstances.
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