Originally Posted by
Shinkers
In all fairness, it could have been the fork I had. Who knows what the inside of it looked like. Had I really wanted to keep the quill, I'd have tried a new threaded fork on this bike. However, I opted to go the threadless route.
It's not just your imagination. Under high stress, quill stems can flex and creak. It's why French constructeurs made non-quill stems as a custom option which worked very much like modern threadless stems except that they didn't preload the headset. Whether it's really much of a problem, I'd err to the side of saying it's mostly a non-issue for most kinds of riding.