Huh? Not sure what slipping the shower has to do with...well, with anything, but maybe I'm missing a remote-control-geek inside joke.

Back to the topic at hand: I got to looking at the guts of this thing with my electronics lady (I work for a manufacturer of heavy oilwell tools, and we design and build our own PCB assemblies - so we were well within her comfort zone), and it turns out that the loose wire I found was actually not a loose wire - it was the RF antenna. What had happened was that when I pushed the battery down in order to show her that when I touched the wire the thing came back to life, it was the act of pushing on the battery that actually brought it back to life - NOT messing with the wire.

So, I've got to do a little more disassembly to get to the real root of the problem; it appears to be something beneath the battery compartment, between the PCB and the keypad.