Possible cause of Media Center remote control button issues related to HID service

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Recently, I heard from a customer who had a problem where some buttons on their remote control worked but others did not.  They tried the workarounds in the Remote Control and IR Receiver Errors section of this blog article, but none of them helped.

Fortunately, they found a post on the Logitech discussion forum that allowed them to fix the problem.  I wanted to post a link to this forum post in case it is helpful to other folks who are having trouble with their remote controls.

The forum post is located at https://forums.logitech.com/logitech/board/message?board.id=general&message.id=2251, and the following is a summary of the workaround listed there that helped the customer that I heard from regarding this issue:

  1. Make sure you installed the latest drivers for your IR receiver
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type services.msc and click OK
  3. In the Services snap-in, locate the Human Interface Device (HID) Input Service and verify that the Startup Type is set to Automatic and the service Status is set to Started
  4. If the service is not started, attempt to start it by right-clicking on it and choosing Start

If the service fails to start with error code 2, use the following steps to add a new value to the registry on your system for hidserv.dll:

  1. Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
  2. Type this command: reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\HidServ\Parameters" /v ServiceDll /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d ^%SystemRoot^%\system32\hidserv.dll /f
  3. Try to start the service again using the above steps