Clausses

Hello guys (and gals)! I've done some searching and haven't found a solution for my exact issue. Bare with me, this post is going to be long. I've tried lots of stuff to resolve this and I'm stumped. So, I always let my car warm up before I drive it. I'm the second owner of my s2, I got it at 42k and have put about 20k miles on it. As soon as I start driving if I try and set cruise control (always well above 19mph) it works just fine. However, after a few minutes of driving, I can no longer set it. But, if I stop and turn the car off and back on again, it will set just fine. It will stay set for (seemingly) forever. It's a 6 speed manual. I have checked the cruise control switches on the steering wheel, they're fine. The switch on the clutch pedal is a new OEM one (I broke the original one on accident when I was adjusting the clutch pedal height- this issue has been a thing ever since I got the car) and I also checked the brake light switch to make sure it was good and clean. The neutral safety switch on the trans seems to check out fine, but, I could not find any resistance value to look for in the service manual. One thing I did notice is that the person who worked on the car before I owned it should have been named Max Torque and that person seemed to live by the philosophy that the proper way to tighten a fastener is to tighten it until it makes a noise and back it off a quarter turn. And, by using this method he has striped out one of the threads for the MAF on the factory airbox. Thanks for the help!