Originally Posted by bfromcolo
This is from Sheldon Brown's glossary:
I was waiting for somebody to bring that up.
The fact is that I do virtually no maintenance on my under the bottom bracket cable guides and I've never, ever had any autoshifting or other problems that I could attrubute to the cable guide. I live 2 miles from Missouri's Katy trail so I do a good amount of riding on crushed limestone. It's still not an issue for me.
The OP, on the other hand, says that he carefully cleans and lubes his cable guide and that it's a mess.