I occasionally take a 3 hours trip to visit my girlfriend's family and the wind noise on the highway has almost driven me crazy. I have always assumed it was the drivers side rear door seal since I can feel some air coming in from around the window but I finally attempted to temporarily solve the issue by thoroughly taping up the frame but it made no difference. (I had already attempted to loosen and adjust them) Are the pre-03 roof rails the culprit?? Are the 03-04 any better?

 

I've never known my roof rails to cause any issues.

 

Your Rover is... JK, Kind of. D2s are noisy.

Check the tops of all of your window frames for gaps on the channel felt, they break apart at the corners due to design and rolling up and down the window makes the vertical piece go lower in the channel.

 

Roof Rails shouldn't cause much wind noise, but if you have cross bars attached to them they can be noisy.

 

X2 on the cross rails. The front one on mine sounds like blowing over the top of a glass soda pop bottle at 55 mph when the front sun roof is open.
The gap is approximately 3/4 inch.

 

I've removed the cross bars on every rover I've owned because they are noisy. I hang on to them in case I need to use them, but I don't keep them on the vehicle.

The D1 was the best, you could put them under the back seat.

 

It might just have something to due with the fact that your truck is shaped like a tuff shed. Just sayin'

 

D2 isn't that noisy, I've always thought they're quite comfortable and relatively quiet in stock form. Not sure why everyone has these loud D2s.

That said, you remove rear carpet, headliner, and rear trim (mine right now), and you're gonna be getting some noise inside.

 

Broken trim pieces can make it noisy. So can bad weather stripping or misadjusted window frames. I never thought my D2 was that bad after I removed the crossbars.

 

I almost forgot: just a couple of weeks ago, I removed the A pillar trim on the right side, just to have a look. When I re-installed it, I left the three plastic trim buttons out. On the first trip, the wind noise howl was so extreme (at 25 miles per hour!) that I pulled over and popped them back in. Noise gone!