You could take a brave pill and sling some automatic transmission fluid in it It's standard practice in E39 M5s and some other manuals of that era. Those boxes are even worse than VW's for 1st-2nd cold shifts, but auto trans fluid totally transforms them.
Thanks Pudding.
So if I were to go the brave route, are we talking about 100ml of ATF to thin the current oil down a little bit?
Nope, drain all the gear oil out and replacing it with transmission fluid
It was on my to do list for mine but I never got around to it. Something like LiquiMoly TopTec 1200 would suffice.
It seems like an alien concept putting automatic transmission fluid in a manual gearbox, but auto boxes also have meshing gears inside them like a manual box, and ATF does them no harm
VW's MTF is so thin, it's probably not far off ATF when hot anyway.
It won't hurt to try it. Just drain it out and put MTF back in if it doesn't work out
You'll soon know, but just drive it gently in your local area at first.
Obviously I'm not pushing this as a wide scale recommendation, but merely as an experiment to see if it helps, so do it at your own risk
If it doesn't hurt M5 gearboxes, I can't see it harming a VW box either tbh. Some OEMs even use ATF in their Manuals