If you have a big problem with your guides you can most likely see it if you pull the valve cover and look down. The guides themselves are plastic and probably would not make a rattle noise if one were to break off and be rubbing against the chain. However, if one is almost off, it will eventually come off, drop into your oil pan and you will start getting low oil pressure after a few min of driving. I know this because it happened to me, and took me a few months to diagnose and fix (actually ended up with me giving up and sending it away to a mechanic...).
The timing chain tensioning rail is aluminum with a plastic coating and the chain does rub on this. The tensioner pushes this rail into the chain to created the tension on the chain. I highly doubt this happened to you, although it did happen to me as seen here:
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smithjs/Site/190E_2.3-16v_Head_Job_Part_II.html
I would take a look down there for your self, taking the valve cover off is a 2min job. I doubt that this would have happened to you, because it only happened to me when my injectors were leaking gas after the car shut off , into the cylinders, and down into the oil. This made the oil less viscous and probably softened the plastic rails, letting the chain chew up the tensioning rail. (Also, the car had a lot of chain slop when I bought it. One of the first things I had to do was replace the tensioner, but that was too late and it had already claimed one guide rail...)
This is a worst case scenario, but I figured that I would pass along my experience with it. There is a lengthy posting on my repair job here:
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/showthread.php?t=187710&highlight=16v