This is a long post, and I'm going to duplicate it on another board I frequent, so apologies in advance to those who have already read it. But I'm really hungry for some feedback on this.

This whole story is going to sound wacky, but I swear it's true, and I'm hoping to get some feedback to reassure me that I diagnosed the problem correctly and that it won't recur.

The remote for my Malata 3600 had been working just fine until Friday night, when suddenly it would either not work at all or might work if I stood right next to the player and pushed the button over and over. Of course, the first thing I did was replace the batteries -- more than once -- but it made no difference; and all the batteries tested as good and worked in my pocket flashlight.

The next evening the problem seemed slightly better but proceeded to get worse. And then things really got odd. The remote for my Kenwood AV receiver started malfunctioning: If I tried to turn the volume up one notch, it wouldn't stop getting louder. I had to hit the mute switch or the volume down switch to stop it -- and one tap on the volume down button would of course make it go steadily downward until I hit the mute button.

It seemed as though my remotes were corrupting each other, but I had had problems with the Kenwood remote before: at random intervals it will simply *stop* working altogether and then will start again just as randomly. So this was just a new phase of its preexisting problems, I figured, and coincidental to the weird Malata behavior.

AND THEN the remote for my cable box started behaving similarly: if I pushed Channel Up, it wouldn't just go one step up; it would continue to cycle through the stations, essentially acting like the volume control on the Kenwood remote.

At that point, I was really in the Twilight Zone. Could some neighbor have recently installed something that was interfering with my remotes?

That notion gave me another crazy idea: I have a jumble of about eight remotes sitting on the small table next to the sofa: 2 DVD players (Malata and Cyberhome), Kenwood amp, JVC TV, two (don't ask) for my JVC VHS deck, one for my Pioneer LD player, and one for my Sony CD player. (I *think* that's the lot of them, but I might be forgetting something.) The table is a mess, and stuff gets shoved around and piled on top of other stuff. Was it possible that something was pressing on one of these remotes, and a signal was going out that was interfering with the remotes I was trying to use?

I nicely removed all the remotes from the table and lined them up with nothing on top of them, and, voila!, all three of the previously "defective" remotes resumed working properly. I haven't had a recurrence of the problems, though it's only been two days, so who knows.

So: Is it possible that my diagnosis was right? Was there something else related to my moving of the remotes that fixed things? Or was it simple coincidence that things happened to get better at that very moment?

It certainly seems like there should be causal relationship, but I've been fooled by assuming that in the past when dealing with situations with multiple variables.

I'm curious to see whether this will also cure the longstanding problems with the Kenwood remote. The table where these were sitting is right at my elbow, and it's quite possible that I would jostle its contents without even realizing it.

Feedback greatly desired.