If you've freshly plugged in the Receiver, it's off. I mean, really off -- there's no power to the Cirrus 7212. In this situation, how's it supposed to respond to IR?

Pressing the power button on the front powers up the CPU.

I suppose that we could have used a PIC to power up the CPU as soon as the mains is plugged in -- I don't recall why we didn't.

Besides, even if the CPU was powered, the initial boot firmware doesn't talk IR anyway -- it has to have loaded the software from the PC before it'll talk IR.