I'm seriously looking at replacing the front shocks here pretty soon regardless.

I would think that a broken shock would cause, like you said, either a random or nearly constant noise though. My noise is pretty much relegated to braking situations which leads me to believe it's not the shocks...but I guess I'll do the shocks anyway.

If the noise is still there, then that's just one more thing I can rule out.

Would still love to hear some more ideas tho....as long as I've got the car up in the air doing the shocks, it'd be a good time to replace whatever else it is that's causing the noise.