Apparently, the act of taking the battery out of the remote, walking it over to the Wal-Mart jewelry counter, and testing it (it was still good, of course) fixed the problem.

I had the same thing happen to me. I took it to a party to use as a DJ machine, and was demonstrating it for some friends. Had already shown it to a few people with no problems. But, when I was showing it to another person, the remote refused to work. I tried taking the battery out and putting it back in, but nothing. I figured the battery went dead. As a side note, I was unplugging the unit in-between demos.

The next day when I plugged the unit in again, the remote worked just fine.

Is it possible that the IR didn't "initialize" or whatever when I plugged it in?