Hey Christophe! Sorry to see you’re still having issues with the remote. You’ll get prints from the COM port even though the debug bool isn’t set. (That just gives more verbose ones.) Just use a terminal program like Putty to read what’s coming in through the port at 57600 baud. Then turn on the Game Frame and pop out the microSD card. You should be able to get remote code prints while the SD error screen is shown on the display.
If we can’t figure this out I’ll get you some new hardware. Feel free to email me (jeremy at this domain).
EDIT: Re-reading your analysis (great work btw) it sounds to me like an issue with the IR receiver. I haven’t seen that before, but there’s a first time for everything. Why else would it act like it received IR signals even with something covering the IR port? The curious thing is why doesn’t it continue to receive phantom codes when it asks you to provide a code for the NEXT button. Fascinating! 🙂
EDIT: One other note, some remotes emit two codes before the repeating code (0xFFFFFFFF/4294967295). I’ve seen this on an apple remote, and these are incompatible with Game Frame. You’re not by chance using one of those, are you? Are all of your experiments with the stock Game Frame remote?