The greatest challenge of all is to stop tinkering and leave it alone once everything is sorted out. Me leaving the HTPC in a weird state too often when tinkering did not help getting the system accepted.
Exactly why I have a dev box - and just upgrade monitor to 1920x1080 - so I can tinker - just updating BBC weather plugin in Titan based on Frames, as I prefer it's layout, then it's the showtimes plugin, like the layout from Avalanche
Re Remote - I had iMon [shuttle case, build in irRec] , worked fine, now have Harmony, again works fine - what was the killer fix for me was shortcutter plugin - have same config on my 4th iteration of system.
Cheers - JCMP.