Thought i'd post to share some points from experience in doing the job and findings afterwards.
In researching the job I found a lot of useful links quite easily, and felt confident doing it as i've done a fair bit of mechanical work before including thermo's / waterpumps on different cars i've owned. Much of the advice online suggested it was a 1hour job, yet it took me 4hours somehow (including bleeding the system). Some of the things I encountered were:
1. Rusty bolts on the undertray, some of which snapped or were too rusty to even remove.
2. Dropping things into the most bizzare places in the engine bay.
3. I lost much more than the 1 litre of coolant that was suggested on some of the walk-through's... more like 3-4litres.
4. I tried to avoid removing the long gold coloured pipe from the egr, but in the end it had to come off so learn from my mistake!
5. One of the plastic mechanisms holding some wiring to the fan shroud was brittle and snapped... cable tie to the rescue.
6. The fan nut was a pain to undo and re-do, but this was expected.
Perhaps most importantly is what i've found after the change... Fuel consumption has increased from around 19mpg (terrible for the 3.0d in my opinion!) to around 23mpg. I've only done 60miles or so since the change but it's significantly improved as I expected, but not much of this mentioned online in what I found.
I also read somewhere that as well as the operating temperature affecting fuel consumption due to the car staying in 'open loop', it can also affect the shift pattern of the gearbox. I'm hoping this will have some impact on the lurch i've been encountering, but will get back on this after more time/miles have passed.
Hope this is of some use to somebody
Edit: For reference, using the hidden menu #7 the coolant temp before the change was only reaching ~65degrees, after it's anwhere in the region of 88-92degrees (optimum operating temp). I found the coolant temp feature on menu #7 very useful for monitoring afterwards to make sure everything was ok and there was no overheating!
Never anthropomorphise computers. They hate that.
