When I came to this question,

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January 25, 2012 at 2:48 pm #6793
DavidStein

    When I came to this question, I didn’t think the microsoft media center remotes were flexible enough (in that i wanted to be ablet o power on the television and control my receiver as well) so I went with a USB IR Receiver from ebay:

    something like this (5$): http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gateway-Symphony-USB-IR-Remote-Receiver-grey-/160655073639?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2567c9e167#ht_2038wt_1396

    and a standard universal remote (15$):

    http://www.amazon.com/Philips-SRP1507-27-Universal-featuring/dp/B004PYS45K/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1327502632&sr=8-6

    there are free programs to let you assign actions to each button, but I never quite got them to work so i splurged for intelliremote (24$):

    http://melloware.com/products/intelliremote/

     

    its a nice flexible system and is close to your budget.