Thanks for your reply.
I do understand what you are saying, and it's possible that your IR Server Suite may become the solution of choice in the future - you've put a lot of effort into understanding the various details of the IR situation, probably more than anyone else working at the moment in the Open Source world.
However, right at the moment, the MCE Replacement Driver that you've written and attached above, seems to work flawlessly with HIP (also free software) under Vista 32-bit. It seems to work in the same way that Bruno's driver works with XP and HIP.
I haven't checked it with Girder or EventGhost, they seem to have more issues with Vista than HIP, and also seem to be less user friendly than HIP as well. (However, there may be some people with more unusual requirements who need to use one of those two packages.)
Vista 64-bit seems to have problems with a lot of existing software ( I haven't actually used it, so I am not qualified to say "most existing software"
). I chose not to install Vista 64-bit for that reason. Just like TCP/IP Version 6, it seems that in 2010, a lot of people and a lot of software systems will be running 64-bit, but it is still something for the future. Of course, all developers need and want their code to work under Vista 64-bit, but we are not there yet.
Both Media Portal and the MS MCE Remote are used primarily for video and audio playback, and Vista does have more advanced and better performing low-level video and audio code. The audio in Windows was entirely rewritten for Vista, and is explained in detail in this thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=713073
The new video system for Vista is explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Foundation