Although you cleaned your MAF, it may beyond cleaning and need to be replaced
I have a 99 and although it's a manual, I had some intermittent issues the one about starting out being similar to what you describe.
Some of my symptoms were:
- RPM surging at idle.
- Poor take off - Pulling out from a stop was a crap shoot. At times it just seem to want to die and I would have to feather the clutch/gas to get it going with it backfiring and when it decided to go it sometimes wanted to just take off which made me fear ending up in someones trunk. and any thoughts of jumping out into traffic were non-existent for fear of it suddenly stalling out. It was most noticeable on upward slopes where a little more gas was required. It felt like the car was either flooded out or running out of gas.
- Deadspot in the powerband - Once it was up and going, everything was fine, no hesitation or roughness except it had a tremendous dead spot at 5k rpm.
Fixes I tried were:
- Swapping out oxygen sensors
- Cleaning the ICV
- Cleaning the MAF
All of which seemed to help initially but shortly afterwards the car would go back to running poorly.
It got so bad that I was afraid to drive the car as well for fear of stalling out and I always made sure I had way more than enough room to pull onto a busy road in case it decided not to go.
I eventually had the MAF changed (as opposed to cleaning it) and all my issues went away. The strangest part of this is that as bad as the car was running it never once threw a CEL.
Goodluck with finding out what's causing your issue.
ian