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I suffered from battery drain issues that I eventually traced to the comfort access door handles. One of the features I discovered from reading the service manuals is that the power distribution module keeps track of the battery state of charge and will start disabling certain features to conserve battery power with the goal of ensuring enough battery charge to start the engine. There are like 30 features on that list and comfort access and remote access are separately enabled/disabled based on how much charge the car thinks the battery has left.
Comfort access never worked right on my 2011 X5M, which I purchased used. The keyless entry would work sometimes and not other times, which I eventually traced to the feature described above. After reading about comfort access issues, I ended up unplugging each of the door handles (my wife wasn't really interested in the feature anyways) and my battery drain/keyless entry issues disappeared. The courtesy LEDs in the door handles are powered separately, so all of that still works perfectly fine.
I never had the warm door handle symptom. It seems if one door handle fails, then the entire system doesn't work. If you're willing to live without the feature, I'd recommend just unplugging each handle.
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