Thanks for the replies gentlemen. I finally got it together. Just surprised the MX-450 is such a POS for its price point. Seriously when a remote control moves into the price range of a laptop or tablet it seems more than absurd to me, especially when it does less than a 6 year old legacy device like a pronto tsu-2000.

I guess I was mistaken - I thought MX-450 would be programmable. After all it has a USB port!

Anyway something was amiss internally from my initial foray into getting the power buttons happy. I reset the device to facotry defaults and started over, and was able to get the macros for Main power off/on to do what I want.

BTW since I was able to make the old pronto work I got it to spit out the discrete codes for directly switching inputs on the Viera TV, learned them into the MX-450, and built my proper switching controls on the menu. There are discrete codes for input switching on the Viera family Bob ;)

The sad thing is I looked on eBay and could have just purchased a NIB TSU-2000 for $70, blasted it with my existing setup w/prontoedit and been on my way.

I'm going to keep the MX-450 for now but just barely ;) Sad to see state of the art has really not improved over a 6 year old device unless you want to pay a laptop price premium...