jj,
Sorry to hear about your mom. Hope she gets better soon.
When you say 'not much power', what exactly do you mean? Dyno charts I've seen from properly running cars show significantly more torque [acceleration] available at 2500 RPM than anywhere else on the curve, so the car accelerates faster in 2nd gear at 2500 than at 5000 RPM. [still not as fast as 1st gear at 5000 RPM, but do you understand what I mean?]. If there's significantly better high-RPM acceleration than low RPM in the same gear then you probably have this problem.
There's probably a better description here:
http://contour.org/forums/Forum3/HTML/001875.html ------------------
92 SHO, 213k, 14.78@96.3
00 Contour SVT, 9.5k, stock
