Daniel,

Thank you so much. That, indeed, is the problem, and it also explains why the eject button doesn't work for my DVD/VHS player. I went hunting for this, first in the RX editor and then in the .pdf manual.

In the manual's appendix, I found this tiny footnote: "To avoid accidental recording, the REC key does not work unless pressed for more than 1 second (factory setting)."

Factory setting? Does that mean it's a default? I then went back to the RX editor and remembered an option that I'm ashamed to admit I ignored, the "Key-pressed time" pull down in the Edit Keys dialog. There is no context help in this oddly designed application, but a search for "key-pressed" (one must use the quotation marks and dash in the help search) reveals that this, indeed, is the option to be changed to defeat the delay.

Thanks again for pointing this out, but I stand by my original notion that this device was, in many respects, badly designed and badly supported (by the documentation, such as it is, the software and lower-level Sony technical support personnel).

Jeff