Here's my happy ending flasher story.
The -20 temperatures finally killed my flasher unit, so after a week of manual flashing, i decided to fix it.
I have a double din dash, so at first i removed the Symphony unit, with the help of four hooks/keys i bought for just over 2E. You can make do with 2 of them, but it'll be a bit of a hustle because for some reason, the bottom clamps on the HU tend to grab the hooks and it's difficult to remove them without having the unit out.
Next i tried to grab the flasher unit from above, but if you have climate and heated seats, it's gonna be a lot of cables preventing you from reaching it.
So i went on to remove the ash tray. First you need to open it's drawer, and behind it you'll see a black plastic bracket on the upper side. Gently remove it and you'll see two screws. Remove them and take out the whole ash tray unit. Behind it you'll see two more screws, holding the flasher unit's cradle in place. Firstly remove the cable connected to the flasher unit. On double din dashes, it is connected from the left side, while on the single din type it's from the right. The cradle is also held by two hooks on it's upper side, but they will detatch once you take these screws outand give it a gentle upward push. Take out the cradle, and then the flasher unit from the cradle.
If you have a hard time taking the cradle out, you could take the climate control unit out. It's held by four clamps ( /_ ) seen in the post below:
http://www.a2oc.net/forum/showpost.php?p=95410&postcount=12
Once the flasher unit removed, take off it's cap and then try to pull out the circuit board from the plastic box. It's held by two plastic teeth, and i could only take it out by breaking them. This is not a problem as it cam later be easily glued back in place because it's not under any stress.
The culprit relay is then visible, the one on the left side if you're looking at the board with the cable plug in top. Mine was producing a lovely electric arc when it was closing it's contact. But enough with the electronic mambo-jambo.
Bought a 1 Euro 12V 10A relay (it's a bit bigger in power handling (A) than the old one, but hopefully it will last just as much as it), removed the old one, soldered 4 wires and attached the new one. It doesn't need to be soldered on the board, because the plastic flasher casing is big enough to acomodate it. Just make sure you use some sort of glue to hold it in place or it will rattle. I used a plastic bar heat gun so i can remove it fi need be. If you've come this far, there is only one thing to look out before replacing the relay, and that is to check that the new relay has a bigger or equal resistivity compared to the old one, we wouldn't want to short anything. Also be sure to properly shield all the exposed cables you added.
Now put it all back together and don't forget to reconnect the cables to the flasher/HU/climate unit.
And there you have it: 3E and one hour of labour is the total cost of a working flasher unit.
What's that AUDI, it's a 200E job?