Tom, thanks for the info. I ended up talking to Jon (VXorado) yesterday on the phone and he said pretty much the same thing that you did. The wear marks don't look drastic enough to bother replacing the green cup, which means that I don't need to drop my front axle. I did look up the axle removal on my shop CD, and even though it doesn't look hard to do, it does get to be pretty involved. I thought that I would be able to unbolt the axle mounting brackets and wiggle things around enough to get the axle out (and then back in). Jon let me know that there really isn't enough room to do that and that you have to split the axle on the car (removing the passenger side axle) in order to get it out and that the process must be reversed to get the axle housing back in.

I was starting to get worried that the more I took out, the more chances I would have to mess the seals up. Since I don't have a leak at the axle seal right now, I sure didn't want to create one. I think I'm going to follow both or your advice and break the new SurTrack axles down and just install the half shafts in my existing green cups. If the clacking continues then I know what I need to do.

I do have one split boot on my passenger side lower ball joint so I'll replace that too, but now the job shouldn't take too long to get everything back together.

Thanks all for the information, suggestions and hand holding.