99 Es300 - Unexpected Benefit Of Cleaning Iac

[late2party]

I just want to see if anyone has a similiar experience. I cleaned the IAC passage with some throttle body cleaner yesterday after having experienced hard cold start issues. The car otherwise would idle perfectly fine, it just didn't want to start when it was cold. So after I sprayed some cleaner through the small hole in the throttle body to free up the IAC shaft (by just removing the coil, without removing either the IAC itself or the throttle body), the cold start issue was solved. As an unexpected benefit, the shift quality actually improved. The car used to lurch a little during the 1st to 2nd upshift, as well as a fairly abrupt 2nd to 1st downshift. It has been like this for quite a while, way before the hard starting problem surfaced. This was most apparent during stop and go traffic, when the car constantly shifted between 1st and 2nd. After having driven the car today over 150 miles, I was surpised to find the much smoother upshift, so much so that it's actually imperceptible unless you look at the tach. You could feel the downshift just a little bit, but it's more "firm" than "abrupt" for sure. I wonder if anyone has an explanation for this. BTW, the car has 104k miles.