Blower issues, first line troubleshooting attempted, assistance requested

[johnnyx5alive]

Hi all,

I've been lurking a while and as such have already seen quite a few issues that arrise in E70 heating.

My vehicle is a 3.0d E70 September 07 (UK RHD if that makes any difference)

I got the car about two months ago and there was an error on the parking break (yellow light, still works via the eletronic release but advises emergency function not available), the roof is in anti trap and frankly I think it's been siliconed shut... and the sos isn't working. I can live with all of these for now and I've been slowly researching them. However it's currently in the region of -5 to 0 degrees C here at the moment and the heating has decided to start playing up

The current state of play is; air comes from the front window/dash vent, the temperature and speed can be changed correctly. No air comes from the foot or body vents. I have always used the auto function to provide air and it's been fine, moving the air round as required. I noticed now that it's cold that my feet, legs and body are getting freezing on my hour commute to work so I put my hand by the vents and nothing is coming out. I set the distribution to manual, turned the front window vent off and all other vents to full, as the front window vent winds down and closes there is a distinct vacum sound noise and then the only sound is the fan blowing against what sounds like a closed vent.

If I then re-open the front window vent the air begins to blow from there again.

I have rear climate control which appears to be blowing but only cold air, cold air also appears to be blowing from under the driver's seat.

I should mention at this point there is no red/blue knob on the centre console and that I have ensured in idrive that the bar is fully red on both sides and have tried various itterations of turning the rear climate on and off as well as following and not following the front climate settings.
On the rear vents the sliders are on red.

Figuring at this point that something was wrong with the blower or FSR I removed the blower from the passenger footwell (fun job...) and now I'm confused... the fan and FSR look nothing like the ones I've seen in other people's posts. The FSR isn't in the hedgehog pattern and the fan's I've seen are double sided. (See attached)
The fan seems to be spinning freely, I ran it at low speeds sitting in the footwell and I put a little WD40 on the moving parts anyway.

My questions are this; does the behaviour described above fit something to do with either of the parts I've located? I noticed on realoem I couldn't even find these parts but I found a fan for the back, presumably somewhere in the arm rest judging by the topology of the vents in the car?
Is the rear, body and foot heat provided by that fan instead and the front window by the one I have removed?

If anybody could shed some light it would be greatly appreciated as I'm tired of freezing my feet off and I do not want to spend a fortune on something I can fix myself (especially as the other issues listed above will be costly no doubt..)

Many thanks in advance!