Equium, thanks for your response above that your new IR543 is working well for you.
As for my IR543 problems, they **seem** to have gone away (and perhaps weren't IR543 problems after all). I haven't posted this fact for a few days since I figured I'd just jinx myself by doing so right away. [Of course, now that I'm writing this, I'm sure the problems will reappear soon! ;-)]
Before I describe what I did which *appears* to have fixed things for me, I would caution that based on my (limited) x10 experiences so far, I'm not confident that my change is real reason things are suddenly better (just like I wouldn't necessarily believe that kicking an appliance to fix a problem is the right solution just because it seemed to work once).
With the above caveats in mind, what I did was adjusted the "sensitivity" setting on my PCS wall switches. I had previously twice changed the sensitivity setting of my PCS wall switches in attempts to enable them to better "hear" the IR543 signals. Of course I only did this when I was having problems. Both times the change seemed to solve the problem, only to have the problems reappear the next day. Well, SO FAR (!!) the third try at this seems to have been the charm, as my IR543 has worked well with my switches for about 5 days now. My PCS switches are now set to be as sensitive as possible (assuming I understand that setting correctly).
If it all stops working again in the near future (I wouldn't be shocked) I'll drop a note into this thread, but for the past few days at least, things seem to be working well for me.
One thing I can't explain about my "fix" is back when I was having problems, WHY my switches always seemed to be able to recognize IR543 hard-button-triggered commands when they could not recognize IR-triggered commands. That was the reason I had assumed it was an IR problem with the IR543 all along. I can't imagine why the signal triggered by the hard-buttons would be different than from IR, but then again, I believe that holding down the hard-buttons might do something which IR can't (not really sure here, but I'm wondering if holding down DIM or BRIGHTEN from the IR543 unit works like the wall switch) so perhaps there is some difference between the two actions?
Anyway, for the moment, my system seems to be working. Of course if it starts failing again I may still decide to replace out the IR543.
