I've never investigated the newer PC programmable remotes because I'm perfectly happy with my ancient Marantz, but one thing I really like is - it being it's fully manual and all (except for RC5 gear, of course) is not every command is programmed into it; only the ones I want. For example, I purposely left out my pre-pro, TV, and DVD players' set-up codes so that way no one can accidentally (or otherwise) mess with my settings. I would assume you can delete stuff out of the data-based type remotes too.

All my macros work fine too. When mine (eventually) dies I think I'm just gonna replace it with a PDA, that I can add VisualMR too and use it for much more than a mere remote.