Worth repairing?

[Tbear]

Hello everyone! First off I'd like to thank everyone involved with the Network here. I bought my SVX almost a year ago now and this site has been an invaluable source of information .

I suppose I should start by warning this could be a tad long-winded. The first two paragraphs can be skipped to get to the point; they are mainly just back story.

I purchased my SVX last summer because I wanted something that would be a good winter vehicle (I'm going to school in a rather snow-intensive area) and I couldn't resist the car's allure. The car ran great for the first few months I owned it, aside from some small tranny issues, until about two weeks before I left for school...it died. It had just over 98k on the odometer.

I was accelerating from a light up when I heard a "pop" followed by a ~10 second long hissing sound. I was only about 1.5 miles from my destination when I heard it, so I figured I would investigate when I got there. But about half a mile down the road, I looked at my temp gauge, which was pegged into the red. Panicing, I coasted to the side of the road and shut off the car. The radiator had boiled over into the reservoir, but steam coming from under the hood was minimal. We let the car cool off and tried to start it again. It did start, but didn't want to stay running and died after a couple minutes. Being so close to leaving for school, we just had it towed back to the garage where it sat for the year.

I had been told it was most likely a head gasket problem, so this summer that's what I expected to do to get it back on the road. However, after taking some things apart it very quickly became obvious that two timing belt idlers had blown up. Ball bearings and seals fell out of the timing cover when I pulled it off. It looks like the water pump has just about completely seized up. I can turn it with my hand, but it is really stiff and "notchy". There is also some of the timing belt melted to the pump's drive pulley.

So my questions are as follows:

Is it likely that the other idler pulleys were damaged when the two exploded? The others spin freely, but the belt created a lot of dust and some seems to have collected along the bearing seals in the remaining idlers.

The pulleys from subaruparts.com ($70-100ea) are kinda expensive, so are there cheaper pulleys out there that people have had good results with?

How likely is it that the head gaskets are blown and/or the heads are cracked? The engine still turns over fine, so it didn't get hot enough to seize.

There are a few cheap used engines in my area right now that would meet my budget (~$400-500)...so I've been in debate of just doing a swap and maybe putting a fresh timing belt on it.

Any and all help/input is greatly appreciated =) And sorry for the long and anticlimactic post...just trying to get as much information packed in as possible. I'll try to get some pics up later.