For some reason, my Premiere XL will stop responding to its remote. The light on the remote works, the amber light on the unit lights up, but there's no response. The weird part is that the machine records, and the picture is not frozen (both tuners, it appears, since once it was the other tuner that was recording); just no response to remotes despite lights on both ends lighting up.

First thing I did was unplug and plug. This of course resolved the issue, but it reoccurred a couple days later. This time, succumbing to the human tendency to fix things with brute force, I kept pressing all the remote buttons. After several key presses, the Premiere XL simply restarted on its own. Several farflung potential nightmare scenarios ensued in my imagination.

First I thought it might be a hard drive problem. One of your techs suggested a kickstart 54 to see if the hard drive was ok. Fair enough, but one thing bothered me: There was no picture freeze.

After digging a bit in various forums, it seems the following are true in these (somewhat alarmingly common, at least for Premiere XLs) instances:

1) The remote and unit respond via lights, despite no results,

2) The picture and recordings continue unaffected,

3) If one continues pressing remote keys, the unit eventually restarts, but, and very importantly

4) If left alone, the unit continues to function (albeit without remote access), and after several minutes (or perhaps even longer), the unit becomes responsive again ... sometimes.

Upon further digging, the following are also true:

4) If you have a Tuning Adapter attached to your unit, these problems tend to be exacerbated,

5) While not responding to the IR remote, the unit will respond to an a network remote app, say on an iTouch or iPhone, which utilizes the network connection to remote control the TiVo unit, and

6) The unit will also respond in this state to the new TiVo Slide remote, which also doesn't use IR, but Bluetooth via USB.

So it seems there is something with Premiere XLs that for lack of a better term "clogs" up the IR passthrough from the remote to the unit, apparently temporarily, but for how long at any one time is anyone's guess. Further clogging up the IR queue results in some kind of overflow error that forces the unit to restart. Waiting may or may not resolve the issue eventually. At the same time, the "unresponsive" unit does respond to other non-IR remote options (iPhone/iTouch app; TiVo Slide remote). (Now, why this is affecting XLs vs non-XLs, and more those with tuning adapters ... who knows?)

Does this make any sense to anyone there? TiVo has acknowledged this issue with XLs, and are working on a permanent fix. At least there are two somewhat kludgey workarounds, and more importantly, this doesn't seem like it's a hard drive issue, and for that, hurray.