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I'm all fixed now and just wanted to update this thread with my findings and resolution. My hope is that it helps others with crashed CCCs not wanting to go the CIC retrofit route.. While I contemplated, I won't be in this car long enough to justify the expense. Saved me some money doing DIY..

I was able to confirm my CCC had crashed. It had a 03/05 manufacture date, so this appeared to be a very early unit. I removed with basic trim with torx bit tools and checked all connections. Both CD & DVD drives would still spin, cooling fan and illumination still worked, but no functioning buttons, so I could not eject the media (nav DVD and single CD).

With these findings, I decided to purchase a factory remanufactured unit from Tischer that has a 2yr warranty. However, there was a core charge for the old unit. I had to crack the cases to retrieve media before sending, because they could not guarantee I'd get it back. This was the most difficult and time consuming part of the entire job, and required some specialty tools (T6/8 torx), but I picked up a kit for $10 and Advance that had what I needed.

I did find units on eBay for considerably less, but opted to go the Dealer route because of the unknowns around purchasing salvaged parts. I also contacted Bimmerretrofit as suggested earlier for a CCC, but told they only source CIC units.

When unit arrived, it was a 15min job to plug in and button everything up, since the old unit was already out. I'm still not sure where the dealer quote of $1500 came from, since I only have a little over an hour into it at this point. Part was half that..unless they are quoting new, which is possible.

Glad to see that there was some plug-and-play functionality upon new CCC installation. My navigation worked and appeared that all of my car monitoring systems were functional. However, I had no audio.. My dings, dongs, and bongs did not work, and had no sound from radio, or any other input. Checked with local indy shop and they said that dealer had to program the new unit, so off it went yesterday. Programming took pretty much all day, and evidently did not work until they did a reset of the CCC and battery together (??). Flat fee of $250 charged (which I thought was a little high), but I'm now back in business!