I see many miles and years of oil sludge - those little bits are crusty oil. My BMW looked the same, my S80 was not so bad. Clean it all up - really clean. Take out all the parts and work around the baffles. make sure your pick up tube and screen is clean.

Looks like your sump pan has been played ...

I recently dropped the sump on my '05 2.4i V70 with 266k miles. Mine was in much better shape, probably due to the dealer oil changes every 7500 miles:

http://i.imgur.com/5zLwjxl.jpg?2

http://i.imgur.com/QOaMViY.jpg?2

My advice is similar, practice to make sure you know how to get the sump ...

Full replacement get my vote, in this thread Jason from FCP mention a fully assembled unit:

https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=68553

Depending on price and what they use for parts (particularly the spring seat) I think I'd go that way if I did this again. There is some ...

Bummer. If you are confident I would pull the entire thing out and check all the parts to make sure it was put together right. Pay attention to the big rubber spring seat as it goes bad. You can get these at Napa in a pinch.

Were it my car I would call around locally for parts to see what is ...

Ok so I tried the things suggested tonight and here are the results,

Video of star nut which was loose...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpAivK18jHE

And video of it all back together, unfortunately still creaking! Turn your speakers up as it is not too loud...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v ...

I had the same creaking on our V70, that was definitely the bearing and it was only bad on the driver side, passenger was not making any noise. At the time the car had 120k and original struts so I changed out everything but springs. Creaking disappeared and I didn't realize how bad the struts were ...

Nice pictures. Forgot that nut, but yes that is it. Remove the nut and the circle plate. The four sided star nut holds everything in place (unless it is stripped which I doubt - but you would know when you loosen the first nut as everything will slide up with each turn) and no geometry should ...

Suspension should turn on the strut bearings - no other play should be evident. Possible things I can think of are your strut bushings or spring seats, the big black rubber pads, are not seated correctly or broken. These fail and separate. Another possibility is the strut mount nut, the star one ...

Yep, I have the same issue with my '98 S70. Started just after replacing the spring seats with HD ones from IPD. Will be pulling that side of the suspension apart next week (noise only comes from the left hand side) to investigate. Seems to have gotten worse as time went on too, over 14 months ...

Ok while thinking about it logically I have come to the conclusion the should of course move with your steering

Has anyone else ever had a creaking top mount bearing then?