How to fix IR learning problems that occur after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005

I have heard from a couple of folks who have had trouble getting IR learning to work for their universal remote controls after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005.

As I described in this blog post, Update Rollup 2 installs an updated set of IR drivers (via KB888795), among other things. Unfortunately, there is a design flaw in the Windows driver installer - it will always writes this registry key anytime a new IR receiver device is enumerated by plug-and-play. The IR rollup package that is installed as a prerequisite of Update Rollup 2 forces such an enumeration when it upgrade the IR drivers. Also, this registry key can be overwritten if you plug in a new IR receiver. Doing so will cause the new device to be enumerated by plug-and-play, and the driver installation overwrites the registry key.

Whenever IR drivers are updated (such as when you install Update Rollup 2), it is necessary to update a registry value to re-enable IR learning in universal remote controls. You can do so by using the following steps to reset the necessary registry value and then rebooting your machine to cause it to take effect:

1. Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
2. Run this command: reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da /v EnableDebounce /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
3. Reboot to cause the change to take effect

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2006
  Hi Ricardo - I have not heard of an issue like that before.  This sounds like a potential driver issue.  Can you please try to update drivers on your system and see if that helps?  If this doesn't help, can you check in your application and system event log to see if there are any entries there that correspond to the time that the bluescreen occurs?  That might help narrow this down as well.  Finally, it might help to install the latest IR driver rollup package.  You can find that at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b39d53f1-0ac9-433b-b488-4cab82f31dc8&DisplayLang=en.
  

• Anonymous
  June 03, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 04, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 30, 2006
  PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/articles/487537.aspx

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2006
  This article serves as a central location for all links to troubleshooting documentation that has been

• Anonymous
  January 10, 2007
  I have VAIO with PCVA-IR6U IR receiver. I recently upgraded to MCE 2005 Update Rollup 2 and I am seeing that everyday at least once the IR receiver freezes. Reboot solves the problem. But when the IR receiver freezes, remote control does not work and if it happens when we are not home, MCE "thinks" its changing channels but in reality the IR signals are not sent to STBs (I have two) and thus the actual channel change does not happen. This results in MCE 'thinking' and thus marking recording as "xyz" on "abc" channel, when in reality what gets recorded is whatever channel the tuner was tuned to before IR reciever got froze. I looked in this blog and downloaded new updates for IR receiver & Oct 06 roll up. This has not helped the situation. Has anybody seen this? Is there a known solution? How can I debug this further? Thanks in advance for suggestions