Blah, I moderate at saabcentral still (even though I haven't had my 9-5 since 09)and put together a decent oil thread stickied at the top of the NG900/9-3 maintenance forum. My name over there is bkrell. I like saabnet but...yeah whatever...
The 9-5 is a great car but you can't take the attitude that the car will be fine b/c it's had regular synthetic oil changes all its life. I've seen too many folks with the same attitude end up with a nice 2.3l paperweight. The crank vent system simply wasn't up to the task. I'd recommend pulling off the valve cover and getting a general idea of the level of sludginess/varnish and if significant, drop the sump. If its blocked, clean it and gently manually clean whatever you can on the bottom end of the engine. When I did likewise on my car, I typically supplemented with auto-rx from then on out and the car was running strong when I traded her off at 150-60k miles (can't remember now!). But oil has gotten a tad better still since then so maybe synthetic alone at 5k will be just fine long term.
The oil pressure thing came from a saab mechanic (Andrews of Princeton) who was taking readings and noticed with Mobil 1 5W30 he didn't seem to hit spec'd oil pressure. After checking various pumps he noted many didn't meet saab's specs. I believe later factory pumps did. But honestly, from what I saw, no one ever had an issue from using 30 weight oils, just from the pump pickup getting clogged.
They are great cars and I almost bought another saab other day. Wifey vetoed though.
