You're right, Maddawg - they've got nothing to do with noise. The spring helpers may provide a small, coincidental measure of sound damping due to the fact that they have mass and are bolted to the frame and thus attenuate some vibes but they in no way insulate the axle from the frame. The exact same axle/frame contact points exist whether the spring helpers are there or not. Sound damping is not their reason for existence. The spring helpers take advantage of the hysteresis of rubber in order to provide rollover protection.
Yes, the sway bar helps limit body roll but, being a torsion bar (i.e., steel spring), it offers the same resistance whether it's being twisted slowly or rapidly and it also returns almost all of the energy it stores. This applies to the coil springs too. Without spring helpers present, the shocks would provide the only damping to control rapid oscillations such as would be seen in a high speed avoidance maneuver - and the engineers apparently decided stiff shocks and springs weren't enough to prevent rollovers and the attorneys and bean counters decided spring helpers were cheaper than settlements, thus we have spring helpers instead of bump stops.
Due to the elastic hysteresis inherent in rubber, the faster the spring helper is compressed, the more resistance it offers, and it doesn't store and return all of that energy but rather converts it to heat. This gives us some rollover protection from botched avoidance maneuvers but the ignorant little chunks of rubber can't tell the difference between a frost heave and a swerve to avoid a deer so we have to put up with a harsh ride if we want avail ourselves of the full measure of safety designed into the VX.
Or one can roll the dice, chop the chunks and roll over square edged bumps in relative comfort - and hope one doesn’t roll over in any other way!
Anyway - the original question was which pieces need to be fixed when the boinging starts. The answer is.... THE SHOCKS!!!!
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But if it's just a harsh ride you're talking about then that's normal. If you're getting a lot of brake dive and pogoing then the dampers are no longer damping. If you've still got the OEMs, you might want to try just adding nitrogen. If that doesn't work, they can be rebuilt. If you've got worn out aftermarket shocks then it's time to replace.