I bought a non-working BL5000 remote control from eBay some weeks ago and it arrived today. It was described to be non-working (without anything more precise). Very clean and with original user manual it did rise a bit high but still I decided to give it ago and won. In private message the seller said that it might have something wrong with the battery holder and indeed it was. The bat.holder was partly melted when someone had tried (and partly) succeeded in replacing the wires to the main board. After replacing the wiring and glueing and tweaking the bat.holder I managed to get it working!
The display (of course, reading about this remote's reputation) is only partly working with several blank/very dim lines. With little guessing one can still make sense of it ("that could be number 2" and "I think it says "NO CONTACT") 
I guess there is no hope to get the display fixed? I tried to google a bit but couldn't find anything else but "no go" -answers from several forums. It's just a glass panel with foil cable... ?
Most threads here and elsewhere on the net complain about the display but I think it's very cool and I like the between-model of BL1000 and Beo4 (in which I can't understand the display that big having only one row of text!). While the BL7000 is just amazing it has the "wake up" delay which I find annoying, when I want to remote control something I want it to react when I press a button!
Bang & Olufsen - The art of controlling sound, picture and light