The wierdness continues.....my system did exactly the same as yours. My wife and I were sitting in the car and I tried resyncing the system a couple of times with no success. She said "let me try it". When she did it, it worked! System worked for about a week and then quit again. Same symptoms.

$1800 sounds high. IIRC my dealer said the module was around $600 and $100 or so to program it. More labor to install, I presume. I think they've got us there, in that we can't buy the module and install it ourselves as the car will be undriveable until it is programmed. I'm going to checkwith my local independent. But first I may look in the unit to see if there's a backup battery that may have died or something. I had a marine chartplotter that quit working once. The only thing wrong was a backup battery. You wouldn't think that was required to operate, just to retain settings with the power off, but when I changed it, the plotter got well.

One thought occurs to me. I believe there is a connection from Tele-Aid to the locking sytem. I wonder if, when the analog cell phone stopped working, that it is somehow screwing up the locks? I'm going to dig around in my maintenance CD and see what I can find.