All steering wheel buttons don't work when temp is below 50 degrees F

[volvoxc7012345]

Hi,

I've had this problem on my 2004 XC70 (225k miles) for the past couple of years now where if the temp is 50F or lower, then all the buttons and stalks do not work (on demand) until the car heated up. This winter I've been using the car more often and it seem that things have gotten much worse and the time to get the stalks/buttons to work is taking sometimes up to 45 mins. I'll list the behavior below:

- if temps above 50 F (spring, summer, fall) everything works on startup 100% of the time
- at night time you can see the buttons backlights blinking slowly at first and then faster as the car heats up, eventually they turn on fully. At that point all the buttons and stalks work
- when the steering wheel buttons aren't working, the light knob to the left of the steering wheel does not work either
- I've connected my buddies scanner to the car when the buttons don't work and it doesn't see the SWM at all, when it gets fixed the SWM module is found. You get the standard communication errors with the SWM.
- last winter sometimes removing the green connector behind the steering wheel after the car was turned on would cause the wipers to turn on and when plugged back in the buttons would work and wipers turned off
- I have not removed the stalks to clean or disconnected any buttons
- I've spoken with my local independent Volvo mechanic (they found the green plug solution) and they have had too many problems with these SWM related issues on older cars like mine and prefer to not work on them. They aren't confident that a SWM replace and reprogram will fix the problem. The time to find the issue makes it a pseudo blank check scenario.

I've read pretty much all the threads about this and found one or two posts that had similar behavior that was temp related as mine but there wasn't any solutions/follow up. Any ideas?

Thanks