Having to disable/enable USBCIR for WMC remote to work?

[clemon79]

Man, I hope someone still reads this forum.

So I recently moved and I thought this issue might be an artifact of the move, but now I'm thinking it's just A Thing.

WMC running on a Windows 7 box, with a USB eHome infrared receiver connected. WMC remote will not work unless I go into Device Manager and disable, then subsequently enable, the "eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR)" device under "Universal Serial Bus controllers," at which point everything starts working again until I suspend or reboot the PC, at which time everything is broken again until I disable/enable as above.

This has been replicated with more than one receiver (in fact originally I suspected the hardware) and both receivers seem to work fine on my Windows 10 machine.

Any ideas as to how I could fix this definitively?

Thanks much!

-- Chris

[CyberSimian]

WMC running on a Windows 7 box, with a USB eHome infrared receiver connected. WMC remote will not work unless I go into Device Manager and disable, then subsequently enable, the "eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR)"

This sounds similar to a long-standing problem that exists with certain WMC IR receivers.

On my system, Windows occasionally reports that a USB device has malfunctioned on wake from sleep or wake from hibernation. I have even had this happen on reboot (although this is much rarer). The device that has malfunctioned is the WMC IR receiver, and I find that simply unplugging it, waiting 10 seconds, and then reconnecting it restores normal operation. Of course, you need to use a USB socket on the front of the HTPC to make this unplugging/replugging easy to perform.

The cause is unknown, but I suspect that it is some sort of timing problem -- one thread tries to query the device before the boot-up/wake-up thread has initialised it (well, maybe). However, this might explain why some HTPCs never suffer from it, while others suffer occasionally (their timings during boot-up/wake-up will be different).

Many WMC IR receivers that use the Microsoft "eHome Infrared Transceiver" driver seem to be made by the same manufacturer, and hence differently-branded WMC IR receivers exhibit this problem. Allegedly there is one version of the HP IR receiver that does not suffer from this problem. There are three or four different versions of the HP receiver -- they all look alike, but have different part numbers. This is the only reference that I have:

http://www.hifi-remote.com/forums/viewt ... highlight=

The solution that I adopted was to NOT use an IR receiver that uses the Microsoft driver. Instead, I use the Ortek VRC-1100 remote control plus IR receiver. This appears as a keyboard device, and doesn't suffer from the problem. Sadly, the Ortek was recently discontinued, but it may still be available from some outlets. It was sold under various brand names, including Hama (which is the one that I have). There is also an Ortek codeset available for Logitech Harmony universal remotes, and separately for One-for-All universal remotes (but, of course, you need the Ortek/Hama IR receiver in order to use a Harmony or One-for-All remote). I currently use the Ortek IR receiver with a Harmony 650.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK