Thanks for the suggestion

Thanks for the suggestion about the keyboard.  I think I’m going to stay away from that though cause I want to try and make this as seemless a transition as possible for my wife.

I was doing a bit more looking and I went to buy.com which i hadn’t previously.  The first result that came up when I searched ‘media center remote’ was the XBox 360 universal remote which it says controls the TV and a media center PC.  Microsoft is selling a newer version on their site, a black one, but I don’t care which it is just as long as it controls the TV.  The big question is, will it work with one of those random IR receiver’s from ebay like the $5 one listed in the post above?  I searched how to get it to work with a PC and it said it would as long as I had the Microsoft remote IR receiver 1.0A.  I hope I’m not beating a dead horse but just throwing this out there in case someone has got it to work!