On top of all the other advice for the 2000 Civic they also started putting the Cabin air filters on them & not the Civics prior to 2000. There are some regular problems with the Automatics where the shifting starts to have problems, needing to clean the shift solenoids metal screens & some replacing the Linear solenod... thats if replacing the transmission fluid doesnt help.
Manuals seem to have less problems.
I have a 96 Civic Automatic with 226k miles on it, of which I have experienced the previous problems with the tranny.

GET THE 2000 model!!