OK, maybe not the same problem, because the thing that's not working for me is the remote. The blaster has always worked great for me with 5.5, with or without the USB cable attached to my UPS. Monitoring is working fine too: the RRD graphs show the current charge of the UPS.

Still, worth a try, unless of course it manages to kill the blaster, which I need a lot more than I need the remote.

EDIT: Nope, didn't help.

I started having trouble again with the remote last week after I moved the TV around the living room. A power-cycle didn't work this time. And as before, I was getting no output on irw so I knew it must've been hardware related again.

So I just played around with the connection into the PVR-150. I just wiggled it around while pressing remote buttons. It turns out my connection is faulty! But if I keep it stressed to the left side of the connector, it works just fine. I just can't move around my mythbox hehe.

So maybe try your connector? Wiggle it around a bit while pressing buttons? Sounds silly, but hey at this point anything is worth a shot right?