When I came to this question,
January 25, 2012 at 2:48 pm
#6793
DavidStein
When I came to this question, I didn’t think the microsoft media center remotes were flexible enough (in that i wanted to be ablet o power on the television and control my receiver as well) so I went with a USB IR Receiver from ebay:
something like this (5$): http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gateway-Symphony-USB-IR-Remote-Receiver-grey-/160655073639?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2567c9e167#ht_2038wt_1396
and a standard universal remote (15$):
there are free programs to let you assign actions to each button, but I never quite got them to work so i splurged for intelliremote (24$):
http://melloware.com/products/intelliremote/
its a nice flexible system and is close to your budget.