hi Folks, just joined, but used guides here many times over the last few years with my current, and previous (mk1) focuses ... focii?

Anyway, over the last little while my key fob hasn't been great, then today stopped unlocking the car altogether, I got another battery and stuck it in, but still no joy. So looked up here, and in the manual about reprogram options, as I'd heard of this being a thing before. Manual states using ignition positions 0-2 which doesn't work for me, though 1-2 does, and I get a beep when I press the button on the fob, so I presume things are being picked up, I even removed the rear of the fob, and held it close by the main part of the key getting into learning mode, then moved it away to program and still got the beep, so I presume the transmitter on both sides is working alright.

Looking around, all I can see is that the car may have disabled remote locking as it thinks it's being nicked, other than the likes of forscan, how can I reset this? I do have a cheap Chinese ELM based bluetooth ODB device, is this likely to be usable with forscan or am I going to need to look at other options? Obviously on a 12 year old car, don't want to go to a main dealer and get a huge bill, but open to weird and wonderful suggestions

My car had this, the fob wasn't the problem, it was as you mentioned the system believing that the car may be stolen/compromised and the remote locking stops working. As you've mentioned you bought a new battery and it does beep, I believe you will need to reset the GEM with Forscan (or other software that can perform the reset). 

I had exactly this problem with mine, took it to a dealer as a last resort and they fixed it for me free of charge. I didn't have the means to perform a rest using forscan. Like you say, somehow the car believed it was getting nicked. Got very tiresome worrying about the alarm going off when unlocking manually!

Just to update this since I'm now sorted. I haven't tried forscan on my odb device yet, but did try a standard fault code reset with it and the android app Torque, which did show an error code it couldn't lookup, but reset didn't solve it. So disconnected the battery, turfed the key in ignition just to get rid of anything with spare charge, and out it back on, and tada, remote working again. So just in case it helps anyone else, if you end up with the same symptoms I ended up with, just pull the battery quickly 😀