I have a USB-UIRT connected to my Vista HP machine and I have installed the Vista drivers for it, however it does not appear that it is communicating with Vista in sending commands. For a remote I am trying my MCE remote that I have for another PC.
Does anyone know how to get a USB-UIRT to work with Vista MC? Is there some setup in MC to make this work? Do you have to use other software like Girder? Seems silly to pay $50 for Girder when I could just buy an MCE remote with receiver and blaster for about $30.
I've been using USBUIRT with VMC with great success. What you need in order to get it to work is Girder: http://www.girder.nl/
Right now it costs money to buy but there's an older 3.x version that used to be shareware that you might be able to find floating around on the internet.
There's some work involved in setting it up and learning to use it, but it works great and you can do more things with it than just MCE. I use a Logitech Harmony 890 Pro remote with it and I can assign any keystroke or OS event to any button or signal on my remote, it's custimizable to no end. What I basically do is map my remote IR signals to the equivalent keystroke commands on my computer, for example when I press the green button on my Harmony the computer does Alt-Windows-Enter (or whatever it is).
The advantage of USBUIRT is that your PC can also control all your stereo components, you just need to teach it. The disadvantage is that you can't use it to control your set-top box natively with MCE, not so good if you want to use your MCE as a PVR. Then there's the learning curve.