Good news and bad news. My 2 year old was very happy to see her daddy last night and wanted to play with him for hours. So there was very little progress on the new AVR. After she went to bed I managed to empty all the secondary items (CD's, DVD's, cables etc...) from the AV rack. Then loosened a couple of fasteners to let me slide the rack open more. It shouldn't take long to pull the old unit out and plug in a few HDMI cables, plus one extra component cable to the zone 2 TV. The speaker wires all have banana plugs. Wifey said that she'll distract the little one for an hour for me.