First off, be gentle, I'm not a programmer like most of the guys here, I barely know what a driver thingie does. That being said, my barely used rio receiver won't power on using the remote control with my PC off. Turn the PC on, and the remote works. Any ideas? thanks.

I think this is normal behaivor.

The Rio Receiver is a slave unit. It runs its player software only after downloading it from the PC's hard disk, then it plays music streamed from the PC's hard disk. If the PC is turned off, the Rio Receiver can't get its player software, and therefore no program is running to "listen" for the signals from the remote.

Question: Since the Rio Receiver is just a slave unit and requires the PC in order to be useful, why are you even trying to turn it on without the PC?

Thanks for the response. I had used it briefly a while back, I moved and just unboxed it again last night. I plugged it in and tried to power it up, and it would not until I hooked it back up to the PC again. Took me 2 hours to figure out that the firewall was set on on the connection due to the XP service pack 2 update. I'm learning. Is this updated software worth messing with?

I don't know which updated software you're refering to, but as a rule of thumb, you should run the latest version of software just to make sure the previous bugs are fixed.

Plug in NICs which have WOL have a little socket which you're supposed to put in a lead which goes to the corresponding socket on a compatible motherboard. It's highly unlikely that you've got the lead though as it usually doesn't come with the NIC.

That said, yeah, it's unreliable and even if it did power up your PC, how long are you willing to wait whilst your PC loads it's OS and finally the Receiver server software? Leave the PC on

I have three machines on my internal home network and WOL works perfectly for me.
I can remotely wake up and shut down the Linux box that has the tRio server and, in fact, do so daily.
I think the "unreliability" issue is likely due to a computer that is too old to properly support WOL. I did have some machines that didn't work so well. But everything I have now works like a charm.