Using the MS MCE Keyboard/Mouse/IR with SageTV.

[deria]

Hi,

My system is going through a rather strenous upgrade at the moment -- because of a keyboard, ironically. I saw the MS MCE Keyboard/Mouse/IR Remote at the store the other day and decided to buy it. I knew that I would also need the XP MCE operating system in order to use it, and because that basically boils down to Windows XP Professional it was an easy choice to make (because I wanted the ability to RDP into my machine instead of using VPN, and wanted to explore some RAID storage options, and laos wanted to use a few of the other "pro only" XP features). So, long story short, I got the keyboard/mouse/ir, xp mce, and the MCE remote.

Now, I will ONLY be using SageTV on this box. It took a while, but I finally got everything working to my satisfaction (all the problems were with hauppage) so now I'm at the point where I can finally use my new keyboard.

Most of the keys seem to be bound to reasonable choices for SageTV. However, some of the keys seem to be invoking the actual MCE interface (as well as whatever sage function the key is bound to). I don't want that. I don't want to see the MCE interface at all, ever, for any reason, or under any circumstances.

Is there a way to prevent the keyboard from starting the MCE interface (for example, when I press guide)?

[Motofreak75]

you have to shutdown all the MCE services (3 of them) and it should work. I dont know the names, but other people can tell you.

I have the 2005 MCE remote/KB and I use it in XP pro, all I did was installed MCE rollup one patch in XP Pro to get the keyboard to work.

[deria]

Originally Posted by Motofreak75

you have to shutdown all the MCE services (3 of them) and it should work. I dont know the names, but other people can tell you.

I have the 2005 MCE remote/KB and I use it in XP pro, all I did was installed MCE rollup one patch in XP Pro to get the keyboard to work.

Well, disabling the services works up-to a point. If I press any of the special remote buttons (like My Music) then the MCE shell gets started again, the services get enabled again, and I'm back where I started.

MCE so far seems to be extremely resilient. I even went so far as to rename ehshell.exe to something else, but it put it back. Its really quite annoying.

Basically I want to find some way to completely disable the MCE interface, but so far I can't.

[deria]

Ok, I think I figured this out. I'm going to make a separate generic post in a minute so that people serching later can find it more easily. Short version, though, is "remove ehtray.exe from your startup list using msconfig". That seems to eliminate the special functionality of the keyboard/mouse/IR device (and the remote control) and leave everything up to SageTV.