The only times that Remote Buddy *may* have any influence on the pairing behavior of devices is *while* you are running Remote Buddy's Setup Wizard to explicitly pair a device. And Remote Buddy has no influence at all on how a device is detected by OS X - particularly with regards to authentication. This behavior is completely controlled by the black box that the OS X Bluetooth stack is to all third-party applications.

A few, quick thoughts, though:

- the 2011 Mac Mini is one of the very first Macs to sport Bluetooth 4.0. This is a new chipset - and changes in the behavior of as well as bugs in Apple's Bluetooth stack realistically have to be expected.

- the 2010 MacBook Pro still uses a 32 Bit kernel under Snow Leopard, whereas 2011 MacBook Pros use a 64 Bit kernel under both Snow Leopard. Both use a 64 Bit kernel under Lion. I know from customer feedback that the 64 Bit version of the Bluetooth stack under Snow Leopard had serious issues and compatibility problems for devices supported by Remote Buddy. Switching to the 32 Bit kernel solved these people's issues instantly. The 64 Bit version of the Bluetooth stack as used in Lion seems to be more mature, though - I personally don't know of any issues.

- Apple has made significant changes to their Bluetooth stack over time. I have stopped counting how often changes to its internal behavior and device support have had effects on third-party software like Remote Buddy.

- if I recall correctly, the PS3 gamepads require special setup via USB before they can successfully pair via Bluetooth. Since PS3 gamepads aren't supported by Remote Buddy at this point, I have no personal experience to share here.

While I can't help you with your particular problem, I can't see how Remote Buddy should have any effect on a device it doesn't even know or support. I simply can't see any mechanism that could.

If still in doubt, just uninstall Candelair and quit Remote Buddy, reboot and retry. With no byte of Remote Buddy's code running at that point, any and all chances of its influence are eliminated. However, since you'll have rebooted at this point, so will all chances of other software as well as broken state information inside Apple's Bluetooth stack. So even if you should succeed in pairing your device then, it still could have been something else and doesn't necessarily mean the issue stemmed from your use of Remote Buddy.

Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz