On starting an MGF with a hair dryer

What a flippin' day of drama it has been so far!! I couldn't get my MGF 1.8VVC ('98) to start up for work this morning. Not a great start to the year!!



It would turn over fine, even fire once every few seconds, but it wouldn't catch. A few minutes and several attempts at starting later the battery is dying so I pop some jump leads on it from our other car. Repeat this process on and off for the next hour or so, and in between...



Fuses? All fine, tried reseating many of them.



Tried reseating cables to the ECU as well, for giggles. No luck there.



One thing I did notice it that the firing became sort of more frequent if you were insistent with the starter, but I don't want to burn that out and the battery would soon sag again even with jump leads so I couldn't just hang on the key and see what happened.



Having exhausted the limits of my automotive abilities at 8:00 on a dark morning, I tried one last thing... I grabbed a hair dryer and aimed it at the air filter and ran it along the inlet manifold for a minute or two.



Went to turn it over and after one or two burps it starts up fine!! :D



So what's the diagnosis, do you reckon? The car has been getting progressively harder to start the last couple of months. Now quite often it grumbles lumpily into life instead of firing up cleanly. When it's very cold outside, it also hesitates at low RPM under acceleration (under 2500rpm) but it took me a while to notice that one as I usually let the coolant warm up before moving off.



Battery? It's always turned over confidently, today was the first day I wore it down...



Sensor somewhere, maybe?



Hopefully not compression? It only had the head gasket done a year ago and they said everything looked good with the engine then. Approaching 90k miles though.



I'm thinking of taking it to a garage really, I have no idea what I'm doing...

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