You're right. It could be many things, for example: 1. Bad battery cable. 2. Bad connections to other end of the cable. 3. Starter solenoid. 4. Key switch. 5. Park/neutral interlock switch. (starter won't work unless the transmission is in park or neutral) 6. Broken ground strap (from engine to body) 7. Bad battery. By the way, does your car have an interlock with the brake pedal, e.g, do you have to depress the brake pedal before the starter will work? You could take it to a good repair shop and let them figure it out.

The charging system may have failed. Also, after starting the engine, the charging system needs several minutes (15 to 30 minutes) to replenish the battery charge. Frequent starts without enough run time will deplete the battery. The new battery may not have been fully charged and soon ran down with frequent starts with short run times. If the engine starts and runs while the shift lever is in park, and then kills when the shift lever is moved to reverse, suspect a broken ground strap. If you smell a hot wiring smell after the engine runs for a minute of two, shut off immediately. When a ground strap is broken, the ignition may complete its circuit through the park-neutral switch, and this circuit may be overloaded. When the shift lever is moved out of park or neutral, the park/neutral switch opens and shuts off the ignition.

I have a 1999 Mazda Protege and just a few days ago replaced the battery for the first time, right the battery served for over 10 years..now how good is that? It was a Panasonic battery, I didn't know they made car batteries. This car was made in Japan, or at least not in the USA. Interesting stimulus for the replacement came when I had it emphasized to me that while an old battery may crank a car easily, it has little more than that in is total capacity. I was thinking about replacing this battery for a couple of years, but it cranked the engine so well, even last winter (New Jersey). So I figured this summer I could slip by and put off replacing it in the late fall...wrong. I was on "assignment" at a friends condo while a new garage door was being installed and I pulled my car up under a tree area and shut down to read a book while I was waiting. I then turned the ignition on so I could run the electric driven windows down, and forgot and left the ignition on... how much drain could that be (rhetorical), and sat back and read my book for about a hour. I then closed the deal with the installer and got back into my car to start it and "click..click" was all I could get. I had to call my wife to come with jumper cables. The point of my story is that it is possible in warm weather for a very weak battery to crank an easy starting car and yet have almost no capacity left over after the crank, and only enough to crank the next time if it is driven far enough to recover that much energy. I replaced the battery with an Exide from the local BJs (club discount store) at about $80 with tax. The battery seems to be a 84 month battery and is called a "Select" model, I can't find anything about the "Select" label on the Exide site...may be a special for BJs. Well the brand is a well know quality product. I was going to buy the upper quality battery Walmart carried, but they were out of the size I needed.

When you go in to get it looked at just ask them to measure the free play on the clutch pedal and also ask them to re-adjust the clutch safety switch a little higher please. When it comes time to change the clutch in the future you will have to have these two measurments re-evaluated, they normally are not by your typical technician. What I just said is not normally checked, but in your case, a paper thin fuzzy floor mat that probably was not all bunched up under the clutch pedal should not have been enough to keep the switch from making contact. If it was bunched up then there you have it. Ask them to make these adjustment to spec and they should have no issue with making an adjustment. OR just direct them to make the switch contact at the very upper limit of the free play zone. If you are going to retest you may be putting too much pressure on the pedal all the way to the floor with the mat under the pedal, since you are now aware of the problem and the test is now biased and unfair. Its quite fair to assume that your seat is too far back and with the mat behind the pedal your leg was just too short to get the switch connected, try shortening your stroke length by moving forward with the mat inserted, but again, your biased still. It also works under the gas pedal, owner complains of loss of accelleration with pedal to the metal, remove floor mat voodoo here too.