[philzgr8]

Power Management Update
First the good news:
Last night I decided to do some experimentation with WOL and to my surprise it worked straight up. That surprised me because most posts I have read said it doesn't but every test I did showed it was definitely the extender waking up the MCE box. At this stage I have not tested whether the login script actually gets run under these circumstances as I had to turn off my other windows box to make sure it didn't interfere with my tests but I will probably work that out over the weekend with some more testing.

...and inevitably... the bad:
OK I am really not sure that power management on the MCE box is to blame but unfortunately I found that after about every 15 minutes of watching recorded TV the extender would become disconnected from the MCE PC. Coincidentally my MCE box is set with MST to go into S3 standby after 15 minutes of idle time. Interestingly the MCE box itself does not go into standby at that time but locks up and becomes totally unresponsive to the point I have to power cycle it. Not even the reset button will make it reboot. This problem is quite disconcerting as there is no warning and when it happens the screen just immediately goes black with no message to explain for several minutes. After a time it does tell you that it has disconnected but you do need to have the patience of a saint.

Anyway, I will do some more research on this today and some more testing over the weekend and see what I can come up with.

P.S. So far investigations via TGB and Google are proving fairly fruitless. I have read about a number of isses but nothing particularly like mine. It may be worthwhile uninstalling SP1 in case my machine happens to be one of those afflicted by one or more of the touted driver problems.