ticking noise and power loss

[mjtr21]

Since I have had this car, which is almost a year, there has always been a ticking noise. It doesnt matter if the engine is cold or hot. The thing is the ticking noise is only prominent when I am revving the engine or accelerating. If the engine is idling you cannot hear it. The higher the engine speed, the louder and faster the tick gets. At first I thought it was a lifter that was gummed up or collapsed but I had a grand am that had that happen and it sounds different. Ive read around and it seems this could be something with the exhaust manifold?

Also I dont know if this is related or not, but when I go to pass a car on the highway and give it more than half throttle, the engine hesitates and stumbles and flashes the SES light. The code for the is for the O2 sensor which I am going to change out tomorrow when I get a chance. Spark plugs and wires are new along with fuel filter and just seafoamed the intake last night.

One more quick question, after I seafoamed the engine I did a visual checkup and noticed that there was a vacuum port on top of the throttle body that looked to be missing something. It has a small piece of hose attached to it and its plugged with a bolt. That cant be right so I looked around and found a picture of harofreak's where I pointed out the hose. His shows a hose coming off of it and going to the rear of the engine somewhere.

[harofreak00]

That vacuum port should be plugged as it was.

I'm not sure where you got that picture of mine, or what car it was from, but disregard it in your situation.

[00Beast]

That line is used on w-bodies (Grand Prix, Impala, etc). Your description sounds like it should be on an SSEi.

The ticking sounds like an exhaust leak.

Flashing SES indicates a misfire. I wonder if you don't have a partially plugged cat. That would make an exhaust leak much worse, and cause bad misfiring at WOT, but allowing enough through at lower RPM's to not be a huge issue. Get your codes scanned at a parts store that does it for free, and bring the codes and definitions back and post them. We'll go from there.