This is a obvious reason that everyone who has an mx 900 SHOULD have a working "Live Update" in their software so everyone with this problem will have the opportunity to hopefully soon have this problem fixed when URC corrects the problem if it is indeed a software issue as suspected.

As I've mentioned before I believe this problem would be ignored by most users including many programmers. I don't think a programmer would even notice it while programming and testing the remote. I didn't. Even Eric didn't see the problem and he uses one in his system.

It's one of those things that we as humans do. We push a button and it doesn't work so we kind of scratch our head for a second but our knee jerk reaction is to just press it again. And of course, in this case, it works on the second press every time so we dismiss it as either a fluke or as operator error. Even if it happens two or three times during the course of an evening session with the remote we still think we didn't push it hard enough or we pushed it at an angle, etc.

I personally believe it exists in all the MX-900s but that most people don't think much of it with the exception of those of us who are sometimes referred to as "perfectionists" or very "detail oriented" people.

I can certainly see that, but the ethical question is now that the fault is known, shouldn't dealers pull the device or at least let potential buyers know?

People can waste a lot of time tracking down flaky problems that they can't do anything about. I sure did trying to get an MRF-300 to work reliably.

This is becoming a problem. We dropped the 850 to carty the 900, not my choice. I have only done about 10 of the 900's and didnt notice or know about the button press problem untill last week. As Mitch said, I just pressed the button again and didnt think about it.
Now if you ad a MRF 300 to this and it happens to be flakey also, it makes you want to pull your hair out.
Hopefully it will be fixed soon

Fixed soon..... amen.

My 900 is far more than intermittent, and applies to quite a number of the buttons.

I'm back using my 800, which certainly isn't so bad, but I'd love to move completely over to my 900.

I sat down last night and programmed my own 900 for my system, two tv's, sat, cablebox, dvd recorder, tuner, cd, ipod docking station. Used it the last couple days, WOW, have to double press way more than I thought, pain in the butt! Went back to my dog chewed up 850, for now.
This is unacceptable, will not program anymore 900's till this is fixed.

Does everybody seem to find that it works nearly 100% of the time when the backlight is on? I can't for the life of me undertand why this kluge works, but I've been using it succesfully ever since I first read about it here. That being said, I would much rather have a remote that operates like it's supposed to, not to mention the fact that having the backlight continuously on really takes a toll on the batteries. I sure hope they fix this problem soon, because I love the 900 and would like to upgrade my 700 and 850 to 900s in the near future.

I have found the same thing. If the backlight is on it works 100% of the time.

For the life of me I can't figure out why the Engineers at URC would release a beta version that is suppose to fix this problem without testing it themselves first. So now we are on round 2 trying to fix the problem. Let's hope round 2 solves it once and for all.

My 900 is better with the backlight on, but not perfect. I still get intermittent misfires, but not nearly as much as without the backlight.

I think that it may be more than just firmware. It may be the physical design where one component/ic is interfering with another in some way, maybe the RF generator or something.

But, I'm not an electronics engineer...........

Is it better or worse with weak batteries?

In my particular case it is worse with weak batteries. But to be honest it only gets worse once the batteries are just about totally discharged.

I suppose it's possible, but I'm fairly certain my remote was working perfectly prior to the most recent firmware upgrade? Can anyone back me up on this?

The batteries in my 900 are virtually brand new.

When this was first reported, (in another thread, I think) someone said that the TX-1000 was having similar problems.

I have both models and my 1000 seems to fail more than my 900.
Does anyone know if URC is treating this as a TX-1000 problem too?

Russ

My thought was that if turning on the backlight was helping, then maybe the voltage is too high and possibly dead batteries might help... but often there's a switching power supply that boosts up the voltage regardless of how low the batteries get. If that's the case it may be strictly the additional load that's helping.

btw, here's something to try... with one of the keys you see the problem with, try programming a macro. Send some key first that'll be ignored. Then send the real key.

Maybe the remote is having issues waking up and sending the first key ...