How to short a Media Center remote control if it stops working correctly

A couple of months ago, I posted a list of workarounds that have proven useful to resolve problems using the Media Center remote control and IR receiver after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005.

Since I posted that, I have received several comments from customers who were able to solve this issue with a different workaround not previously listed on that post. I have found that internet searches do not do a great job of indexing blog comments, but they do well for the main body text of blog posts, so I wanted to post this suggestion as a separate blog post in the hope that others will be able to find it more easily. I can't take any credit for finding this workaround. It was posted as a comment on my previous blog post by a kind customer who discovered it and found it useful, and I have heard from several additional customers who indicated that it has helped them as well.

I encourage you to try this workaround if you have already exhausted the list of suggestions located in my previous blog post and still have problems getting your Media Center remote control and/or IR receiver to work correctly.

Symptoms

  • Media Center only receives the first button press (for example - pressing up, up, up only goes up once, but pressing down, up, down, up will work correctly)
  • The IR receiver light does not blink when pressing a button
  • Pressing buttons on the remote do not have any effect

Workaround

Remove the batteries from the remote control and short the battery terminals using a small metal object such as a paper clip.

There is enough capacitance remote control circuit board to keep it alive for hours even after you remove the batteries. However, you can workaround this and drain the capacitors by shorting two of the adjacent battery terminals on the remote. Different remotes have different configurations, so it is difficult to know \which two adjacent terminals are the ones wired to the circuit board (the other two are simply a short to connect one battery to the other). Therefore, you should short both pair of adjacent terminals, which can be achieved by using a paper clip. After that, re-insert the batteries and try to use the remote control again.