Driving home from a 2-hour round trip commute, with a brief stop and no issues, we suddenly had problems while trying to proceed from a stop light. I pressed on the gas pedal and heard RRRR! as the engine revved up, but the car did not get going. I looked down, thinking my passenger had accidentally knocked the car into neutral. No, I was still in D4. The car managed to slug along until we pulled over in a parking lot a short way away. I did not park but the car seemed ok going slow, so pulled back out on the highway, and when I tried to merge into traffic after a stop sign the same rev up happened when I stepped on the gas. I tried putting the car into a lower gear. No difference. I managed to limp the 2 miles home with the flashers going. I looked at the dash and noticed the lights were going on and off, and the odometer and speedometer needles were bouncing up and down like crazy. I had already turned off the radio, AC, and headlights, which had been on. At one point everything on the instrument cluster panel stopped working and the gas gauge dropped to empty (it was just a hair below half, so plenty of gas). When I pulled into our driveway and put the car in park, it didn't shift as easily as it usually does, and I could feel and hear a brief grinding. I went to put up the automatic windows before shutting off the car. The driver's side window wouldn't go up (the windows were all down) and the other three went up extremely slowly. The maintenance light has been flashing then shutting off (not remaining on or continuously flashing) for the past couple weeks or so, but dad (original owner of the car) didn't think anything about it. Last weekend he and a friend were working on changing out the brake pads and routers when the battery dropped dead, so they installed a new one. They never reset the PCM. The car was driven on a 2 hr round trip commute 2 times after that, just around town a bit, then another 2 hr round trip commute with no apparent issues after this, until today. Could this be caused by the PCM not being reset?

(PS: About 5 1/2 hours after we got home I tried turning the key to accessories, without turning the car on, and when I tried to put the driver's side window up it went up like usual, no issues).