Last night when I took my car out for a drive, it started downshifting form 4th gear to 3rd early, and not shiftintg to 4th.

I took it on the road for 30 miles this morning, and it did fine on the freeway, but when I stopped at a toll booth, it didn't want to shift out of 1st.

Bringing it back home, I found it didn't want to downshift to 1st when stopping, unless I did it manually. And it was reluctant to upshift to other gears. If I manually dropped it to the lower gear, and back up to the higher gear manually, after 3-4 attempts, it would shift.

My transmission cooler has a fan on it, with a temp control. I have a pilot light tha tlights when the fan comes on. It appeared to me that it wasn't coming on but very little, although it would come on some, but not for long. It is a cool morning, and I know that when it's cool, that has seemed normal. Although, with this going on, I paid a lot of more attention to it, and it seems like it wasn't on as much as it should be. I had heared that a 700-R4 did not have a fluid pump, and that it only pumped fluid when in 4th gear. Most of the time I was not in 4th gear (didn't much want to go into that gear). Although, I know that very commonly the fan does come on on the cooler when driving around town.

I changed the fluid a few weeks ago, and it looked good, and not full of metal shavings.

Anhy ideas what would cause this type of problem?

Could it be too much fluid? (I have a braided transmission dip stick line, and a plastic dip stick. Fluid doesn't want to stick to the stick, and I wonder if it is running down the stick when I check it, making it look ok on level when it is actually too full.)

Any thoughts appreciated.