91 Civic Will Not Start

Thanks for any help in advance.

I have a 91 Civic Si 1.6L. Have had it for a few years and runs like a
champ until now. After a nice drive one day I came home and it would not
crank.

- At first I could hear some very light clicking noise (sounds very
electrical) at the starter itself when I attempt to crank it. (No engine
turn whatsoever.) During this test, I did verify that when the clutch was
NOT pressed it there was NO light electrical click sound at starter so I
tend to believe that the clutch switch is working. Also I took a volt meter
and hooked it up to the small wire that runs to the starter solenoid and was
getting different signal when clutch pedal was pressed in.
-I thought it might be the starter to I took it off and went to Autozone and
they hooked it up on their machine with and the starter spun right up with
force!
-They said it may be the starter and that sometime when it's removed the
solenoid gets jerked around and it temporarily works. Since the starter
seems to be working I didn't buy a new one and stuck the same one on the
car. I attempted to hook up the power straight from the battery to the
starter just like they did and I think I fried something in my instrument
cluster because there was some smoke and my turn signal indicator in the
cluster comes on when ignition is turned on. (oops!)

-Anyway - I tried to crank the engine - no crank. (not even the light
clicking electrical noise I was getting before.)
-A friend bought me a brand new (rebuilt I assume) starter and we swapped it
out thinking that it may have been the selonoid with no luck. No crank on
the new starter. Oh- I have good battery.
-The car itself runs fine... my friend and I did a pushed compression start
and performed a confidence hop around the block. The car runs fine.
-I did checked all of my fuses and they all seem to be good.
-At the moment, I removed my starter relay and gave it to my friend who's
going to try it on his 91 Civic Si. (He lives 300 miles away and was
visiting when he dropped off the starter, he will probably test it out on
July 4th.)

Anyway... sorry for the long story but had to give as much information as I
could to maybe get to the source of the starting problem and get some idea
of where to check next.

The underlying problem is that the car is NOT CRANKING. I just want to do
good troubleshooting and not start changing parts... for example, we might
have just swapped out a perfectly good starter but since we installed the
part we can't return it.

Again... thanks in advance for any advice.