Hello;
I had this problem;

A couple of years ago I received- as a new house gift a Home Theater Master remote control model : MX 700-custom programmed;
This was been received from a business partner- and- as I understood it was purchased from your partner- AVITECH Co. in Romania ( at that time).
Due to some unfortunate events I had no opportunity to open the box and to use this remote ( or the little one) up to November last year( 2009) when my house was ready to move-! in;
This remote was supposed to manage the controls over the Onkyo A-V equipments, together with the EIKI/ Sanyo video projector, and- I have enough experience to set-up the remote for all the equipments I need to control;
BUT:
It was impossible to be used- because both remotes have a sticky plastic body ( as the plastic body was melted and become sticky);
Unfortunately, when I try to find-out what is to be done- and asked my partner what can I do- he told me to write-you- in the hope that- somehow I will get directions to remove the sticky material- or- to replace the bodies with clean ones;
I never find-out in my entire career such a issue- and I didnt believed until now- that the plastic on a $500 remote could be expired as it is;

Please- give-me directions over the method to get the remote useful;

The serial numbers are:
MX 700 Ver 1.0
0502A02601

Notice: I never used the remote- nor programmed; Is brand new except the sticky body;
Thank-you for helping-me out;


The answer form the "tech dept" was :
"On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 7:39 PM, tech reply <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi Gabriel,

We appreciate you contacting Universal Remote Control, Inc and your continued patronage.

Our repairs dept. has tried every conceivable method to successfully clean the MX-700 remote to no avail. Unfortunately we yet to find a way to properly clean these units. Sorry about that!


Technical Support
Universal Remote Control, Inc.
500 Mamaroneck Avenue
Harrison NY, 10528
914.835.4484
914.835.1826 f "
What do you believe?

Maybe the should sell something else, probably the can do a great job on agriculture, or something else..

Please- if you have any ideea on How To clean ( myself) the sticky plastic body- I`ll be grateful;

You could open it up, remove the guts, sand blast it, repaint it, then put it back together again. Or buy a MX850 and transfer the programming.
It's a shame about the MX200 sidekick, you could get top $$ if that was still usable.

As I mentioned in an email but may as well follow up here - the problem is specifically the dark blue paint used on the bottom half of the MX-700 case. There's no easy way to remove the stickiness or even remove the paint itself. This doesn't occur on newer models, and interestingly I have a second, newer MX-700 case where this has not become an issue.

You might consider the price of a mx-500, or its clone, worth it to get a new back for the mx-700?

[Link: amazon.com]

Yeah, the clone is under $50. Earlier this week I saw it for one day at $31 - unbelieveable!

Otherwise you could look around for an otherwise non-functional MX-500, 600, 650, 700, 800, 850...

Woo, it's $31.49 again.

Yeah. I thought my mx-700 was dead so I bought that one $40 with 2 day shipping, but I was able to restore my 700 from the ram-empty error.