05/06 Ford Freestar with a blank IPC cluster?

A day from hell is what it was!

I get this ’05 Freestar’ in from another Car care shop that has a ‘blank odometer screen’ So I begin checking this thing and found that the screen is not black it just has dash lines like this —– so I thought wtf was he talking about so I called him up and he said that he changed the IPC already and that all I needed to do was reprogram the IPC to that vehicle and marry the vin to the IPC. Sure!

The problem started with a no communication problem to any of the modules on the can network nor the IPC.
If that wasn’t bad enough there was no communication through FMP77 either for the program process to take place. So I called again and got some half jack answer of ‘No one knows if it could communicate before’ and they didn’t send the old cluster for me to change back.
I spent a few hours ringing out the bus wires to determine there were no problems with any one module either on the network or bypassed, I called the shop back and told them to bring the old cluster so I could change it back and what I found when I plugged the old module in was that the vehicle started to communicate and that the vehicle was not an 05 but an 06 and that the part number of the IPC that the salvage yard sold them didn’t support that build and wasn’t capable of being used in that vehicle.

What a freaking joke! What was really funny was if the PCM could have communicated with the IPC the vehicle would have been a ‘Crank no start’ as the theft system is utilized through the IPC and the keys stored in memory of the IPC are obviously different from the one present and since there wasn’t communications neither module knew otherwise which is why I was confused to begin with.

You couldn’t have planned a better case file than this…But this is what I get for knowing what I know, and doing what I do.