[philzgr8]

To be fair, I don't think I've ever had heaps of success with WOL. It always seems to me that the slightest bit of activity on the network at all will wake the machine and then the question has to be asked as to why you would bother letting it sleep at all.

I have always had the "when sharing media" option turned off since it meant that my machine never went into standby. I'm not sure how this affects things but in the end it's pretty clear that Microsoft never expected a Media Center to be capable of going into S3 while configured with an extender. For the life of me though I can't see why the interface becomes unresponsive. I'm not even sure it has anything at all to do with power management.