Octavia (Mk 1) 1.8T L & K battery probs

My first "broadcast" to the wide world of Briskoda. Fantastically informative (mostly!) site. I'm still slightly in awe of the web - its truly wondrous - yet I still shout at it when its slow or unresponsive. How much for granted we already take it. Ah well....

We have a Skoda estate as above. We love it and its always been chipped to 175 bhp - never been very happy with the map which S****chip (are we allowed to mention tradenames?) fitted and remapped and remapped on their rolling road until I was bored with them. I think ours was their first....

Its just cracked the 100K miles. I tend to do oil changing and basic maintenance myself and get my wonderful family-run garage Grey Gables (Witney, Oxon) to do the hard bits such as clutch master cylinder, wheel bearings and the normal failed VW coils. I have nothing but praise for them. They are the only garage I know of which lets you take your car away and sends the bill in the post. Not only trusting but charming really. I pay by cc over the phone as soon as I receive it as a pay off for their trust.

Anyway, can anyone out there help with a battery problem. Wife came back last night to say the car was misbehaving and, from what she said, it sounded like the car went onto "get home" mode. Had a look and there was clearly a problem with slow cranking of starter motor. Took reading off terminals and only 10v (13v charging) neither of which is good enough but then it is 5 yrs old and I reckon thats a fair life. Put a slave battery across the terminals and all fine. So I'll buy a new battery...

What I want to know, though, is what is the "shunt" on top of the battery all about? It seems to be a way of getting more connections direct from the live terminal without overloading the main terminal. Its got about 5 connections off it from fused connectors (plates of metal narrowing in the middle) and one of them, the only black one, has overheated and melted the plastic around it, as well as ruining the metal to metal connection, but not actually fused. I'm CONfused.

Also does anyone know the best way of changing the pollen filter without crushing ones hand between the plastic at the base of the windscreen and the top of the bulkhead? I can't work out how it comes off - yet it surely must!

And, finally (part one), why doesn't Haynes do a manual?

That's probably enough from me - I may be overstaying my welcome here. Incidentally, sorry to go on, I'm probably alone in finding it hard to work out how to post a message on this website. I don't know whether this is going to appear in the correct forum or even appear at all. There seem to be several fora although I haven't yet worked out whether posting one message covers the whole lot.

Here's hoping!

Regards