I agree with rhm9 and QQQ, I HATE prontos...
I hate how the third largest consumer electronics manufacturer allows buggy products to hit the market and forces us to debug them at our exppense and wait for software and firmware updates to be posted that compensate for their poor R&D.
I would have to agree that the Intellicontrol is a reliable piece, but I like the RTI better these days. Back in the day, the choice was Intellicontrol or the Lexicon 500T (later, the 700T) These were made by RTI and their new line is considerably more powerful than anything short of Crestron or AMX and the hard keys for transport navigation, volume and channel are a lot more useful than the ones on a pronto or Intellicontrol. The biggest bitch about the old RTI, range on the RF device, is improved now with the addition of the RF repeater system where you can add repeaters to extend the range throughout the property to anywhere that you can get a piece of IR wire or CAT-5. Works great.

Side question... is there decent resolution of the level of IR picked up on those testing cards?? I have always used the flashing emitter to test for random signal of stray light interference on an IR network, but I know that some systems are super noisy to the point of unreliability, but the noise in the lines is still below the threshold where the LED gets triggered.