Thanks for the replies.
Just to clear up one point. We are talking about autostart and not a normal manual start. During an autostart sequence pulling the start switch does nothing until the fuel lever is selected to run then the start valve opens etc. Doing either first sems to work (at least it does in the sim package and the docs indicate clearly that the fuel lever is selected to run prior to pulling the start switch). To me this seems a recipe for potential disaster especially if you run a mix of autostart and manual start engines. It may also cause different EICAS messages to appear during the start...I dont know. What do Cathay or Qantas do for example?