Vauxhall Zafira owners - can you help me????

[Cloudhopper]

My Zafira has started to break down. Only had it two years second hand, but has about 50k miles on the clock.

It is sluggish, struggling on hills and making a knocking/metallic noise. It has lost power basically.

A funny light has come on on the dashboard - it is a yellow one and looks like a jigsaw piece or something - hard to describe.

I wondered if any other Zafira owners had come across this before and might know what is wrong. Obviously I will have to take it to the garage, but I always seem to get ripped off.

It supposedly had a full service about two months ago, and a change of cambelt, so I am desperately hoping that it is only a trivial thing.

Thanks fio - I hope you're right and that's all it is. It has been 'skipping a beat' occasionally in the last couple of weeks, but it feels like something went wrong half way home today.

It is too slow to drive properly on the road, so it is a two train journey to work with the two girls tomorrow. Should be fun.

Car repairs always cost a lot - sometimes I'm sure they just see me coming!

The funny light is your emissions light, mine did this, then a few weeks later lost power all together, it was the starting motor (when you put key in and start, the key stays in and burns out the starting motor) it is a known fault with Zafiras apparently luckily mine was under NetworkQ. BUT 7 months later it happened again, again they didn't charge me, I would have it checked out.