Ok, this is so interesting. I can confirm all that you guys said.
I've been having the same problem with my wheel remote by Kenwood, the one comaptible with the empeg since its early days (before Mark's Hijack). It's been working perfectly for almost a year. Then it started to behave exactly as you guys describe. My digital camera showed the steady light when it used to hang. I replaced the battery with the one in the Empeg remote (I use the rio remote, which I also have, so I keep the empeg one as a collectible) and everything went back to normality for a while. Now I am back to the same problem, which makes sense because the battery I am using now is old as well.