From reading the "monopolistic outfit's" website, the bad chip is in the LCD screen.
A mate at work who bought his XR6T-LE from the same "batch" that mine came from had his go blank (he couldn't remember what might have caused it - but Ford charged him over a grand to fix it). My battery change 5 years ago went smoothly, but I'm probably due for another one soonish. A real worry.
If anyone has a broken LCD panel, which they have lying around because they "upgraded" to a 3rd party
ICC to resolve it, I'd be interested in looking at it if it's near Canberra. It needs to be blank and not stuck on the spash screen. If it's just an underrated power regulator, which works ok with FoMoCo's cr@p batteries that don't charge much over 12v - but with a good new ~14.7v battery blows it, then I'd share a how-to to fix them.
I know the alternator puts out 14.7v but all the caps in the screen are charged by the time the engine is started, so a badly picked regulator might not be stressed as much as connecting up a full battery to a drained
ICC unit. Of course it might be some other chip that goes which is hard to source.