I thought for sure I would have revived this thread already and started swapping posts about minimum valve lift settings and such. Every time my X5 got to the cold weather, it would flash CEL and run like crap when you started it. If you turned off and back on soon enough, you would avoid the permanent CEL and it would run fine. I was playing around with intermediate lever lift settings forever.
This year however, I haven't had one instance. And it's been really cold (-20C for a good spell).
Wind the clock back a few months. I had what I thought was faulty ignition switch (replaced it). Turns out it was the starter. But in my pursuit to diagnose, I stumbled across the integrated voltage module (IVM). I found a schematic that showed that module tied to the servos (among a host of other components). For the life of me I can't reproduce that site or schematic, but trust me, I saw it. Either way, I replaced mine. It looked fine, slight condensation markings, but no smoking gun. My X5 has 285,000km. Note, I did validate back at 180,000km that my batch of levers was not part of the recall batch.
This winter, zero mangled starts, no CEL, no restarting every other cold start.
The module wasn't too pricey from the dealer and easy to replace. Worth it if it truly fixes it for some of us
