After reading up on all the messages concerning the MAF sensor, I decided to take a crack at cleaning it. Here is a pic of the sensor out of a '94 X with 40K. There are two instrument wires, one hot and one cold (nearest). The cold wire was clean. The hot wire had a grey pebble textured residue on the posts and the wire. This could definitely affect sensor performace.
Each wire consisted of a teflon tube (.030 Dia.) with a very very small wire coil inside connected to a thicker wire attached to the posts.
One shot with a (no residue) electronic part cleaner (safe for plastics) cleaned the wire sensors.

There is no way I would consider touching these wire sensors with anything but a light blast of compressed gas.
Bottom line: While it certainly appeared to need to be cleaned, there was no difference in performace.





http://www.ebold.com/~ccc/photos/MAF_sensor.jpg

Did you reset the computer?
Also I don't think that cleaning will change the performance rather that cleaning will make the engine run smoother as the computer will get correct signals and set the mixture accordingly.(this may lead to a slight increase in performance but vertually unditectable):D