mistery no start problem

A little background on the issue. My girlfriend has a 1998 metro lsi 1.3l. She went to jiffey lube to have the oil changed and they talked her into flushing the coolant. Well she drive home about 3 miles and when she comes in she tells me water is leaking. I go out and look and water is coming out the cam belt housing.

So the next day I got a water pump new timing belt and go to town. Got it all done and it fired right up. Every thing looked great and I drove it around and when I got back I noticed oil leaking. It was coming out the cam housing. I figure it is the front engine seal. Well I get a new pan gasket oil pump gasket cam and engine seal. Pull it all back apart put all the new parts in and buttoned it up. Add oil and go to start it it turns over but no fire.
Pull spark plug plenty of spark. I can smell fuel but it will not fire up. give it a couple minuites and turn the key again and it fires right up and sounds perfect, idles smooth ran perfect. Shut it off go to fire it up nothing again.
it will start and runs perfect about ever 40th try.
Acouple things I can think of
1. When I pulled it apart their was no pan gasket. Someone had used high temp rtv to seal it up. The crank position senor bults to the bottom of the pan so with the gasket it holds the sensor farther away from the trigger wheel. Could it just not be picking up the siganl good enough.
2. I put all my bolts and stuff in magnetic trays so I dont loose bolts. Could I have demagnatised the crank trigger which is the lower cam belt pulley by putting it in the magnetic tray.

Please help. thanks wes

I checked the timing and it was dead on. The car ran fine before I worked on it. It has spark even when it doesn't start.

Could a car run perfectly with the timing off one tooth. Because when it starts there is not miss or rough idle nothing

I think DieInterim is right, if it's getting spark, it shouldn't be the pan gasket that's causing a problem.

I don't have an answer for your problem but I'm in need of fixing my oil pan gasket. You bring up an interesting point about the additional distance from the crank sprocket trigger wheel and the sensor. Is there a way of compensating for the additional thickness of the gasket? Do I need to worry about it? Is this likely to effect performance?

I didn't say anything earlier, cause it sounded like you had it running after changing your timing belt, but I guess it won't hurt to mention this. When you put the cam gear back on, did you notice two marks? There are two marks on the timing gear (cam axle) One mark is 60a, and the other is 80c. My understanding is 60a is for the 4 cyl, and 80c is for the three cyl. I had mine backwards, putting the timing out by about 120 degrees.

Jai