This posting is older than 6 months and can contain outdated information.
My first reply was to the initial version of your posting - I get all forum posts by email (edits not included) and also reply that way. I just saw on the web that you edited it and removed most of your pretty wild accusations that your initial posting contained. That's a start.
You're still making a wrong claim here, though, in stating that Remote Buddy has any involvement with your issue. This is NOT the case. Your issue is exclusively and solely a Boxee issue and nothing else - especially not Remote Buddy - plays any role in this.
Since you have questioned my person, my authority, knowledge and the accuracy of what I say, I feel that, really, the only way to react is by confronting your assumptions and wrong allegations with actual facts. Here we go:
First, as I already wrote, Remote Buddy doesn't use any locking on the Apple Remote driver and also doesn't contain any code that could. That it does, however, would be THE absolutely essential, basic requirement for it to be able to have *ANY* influence on Boxee's Apple Remote helper tool that has caused your issue. As it is, however, Remote Buddy doesn't even contain any such code.
Second, locking on IOKit resources like the Apple Remote HID device requires the application that wants to hold a lock to actually run. IOKit automatically takes care that all exclusive locks are released as soon as an application quits or crashes. No IOKit locks on HID devices like the Apple Remote can survive quitting or crashing an application, let alone an uninstall or reboot (as you claimed in your original post). Other than you claimed in your original post, code that doesn't run or even no longer exists on your Mac can't do any IOKit locking.
Third, you appear to be using OS X 10.6 and Boxee. It is a well known and well documented fact that Boxee's Apple Remote support does NOT work on OS X 10.6.2+ and causes EXACTLY the issue you had. Just ask Google. Not only will you find numerous users that had the exact same issue as you after installing Boxee under OS X 10.6 (f.ex. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=236587 - notice how Remote Buddy doesn't play any role there at all? And they all have the same issue as you.. strange, huh?). You'll also find that Boxee themselves readily acknowledge that their Apple Remote support simply doesn't work under OS X 10.6 and that the only way to get their Apple Remote support to do anything (apart from blocking the Apple Remote for everything else) under OS X 10.6 is to install our Candelair driver and enable the Legacy Compatibility Mode. Just check out boxee_help on Twitter or Apple Remote related topics on IIRC Boxee's getsatisfaction page.
Fourth, if Boxee ever worked with your Apple Remote under OS X 10.6, you must already have been using our Candelair driver. The Candelair driver, however, is nothing else but the same driver that also ships as part of Remote Buddy. So if you uninstalled Remote Buddy completely - including the driver it shares with Candelair - you also removed Candelair - and with it the only way to actually USE Boxee's broken built-in Apple Remote support under OS X 10.6.
Fifth, what is so problematic about Boxee's built-in Apple Remote support is that it acquires an exclusive lock on the Apple Remote and then bases the interpretation of the events it receives not on the actual information that it receives from the system but on hardcoded internals of HID element offsets in the HID descriptor of the Apple Remote driver itself. Since these internals vary between OS releases and (once again) changed in OS X 10.6.2+ and Boxee didn't update their code to be compatible again, their helper tool currently just acquires an exclusive lock on the Apple Remote (thereby disabling all built-in OS X functionality as well as hindering all other applications from accessing the Apple Remote via an exclusive lock). The result: only Boxee receives the events, can't make sense of it and does nothing. Plus, no one else gets the events. Your Apple Remote seems to not work anymore. And, finally, if you enable an option in Boxee, Boxee will take care of its helper being started right after system startup, making it impossible for you to use your Apple Remote even if Boxee doesn't appear to run - Boxee's helper sure does.
Sixth, to conclude: you ran Boxee, with this well known OS X 10.6 issue that is ENTIRELY unrelated to Remote Buddy and that shows just as well on pristine OS X 10.6.2+ installs. You enabled this option (or it is enabled by default) so that Boxee's helper runs all the time, right after system startup. Running Boxee's helper effectively renders your Apple Remote non usable for the time it runs because of its broken Apple Remote support. Of course, you experienced this well known Boxee issue just like anybody else. Then, using the information I and my tool, Remote Control Diagnostics, provided you with, you quit the Boxee helper. You quit the software that caused you the issue (Boxee's helper) and the issue disappeared. Not really a surprise. Then you pointed fingers at someone completely uninvolved and gave him all the blame.
If you must blame someone for your issue, blame Boxee for not fixing their code and still not being Snow Leopard compatible. Not that my free HIDRemote class (which does not depend on any internals, which has none of the many other issues the code currently used in Boxee has and which greatly improves the user experience by just working) wasn't available for almost a year by now and adoption of it is pretty simple and straightforward ..
- Felix Schwarz
