[pumkinut]

as long as i don't remove the bios battery again

As I said, workaround. Don't kid yourself, it's not permanently fixed, and is clearly a defect. One day when your battery runs out, you'll need to reinstall windows/drivers to 'reinitialise' the IRQ stuff (which seems to be the problem) at the bios level, and then you'll get your functionality back.

On that alone, I will not be buying any further NUCs (especially for family) if I'm going to have to deal with issues like this. It needs to work out of the box, which it doesn't.

I've already escalated the problem with detailed test results to Intel support, and they're fully aware, saying that multiple people have this issue.

My MCE remote powers my i3 Haswell NUC without issue and without having to install Windows in order to then install a driver. I got the NUC new at MicroCenter, and the first thing I did was install the beta BIOS. I then tried OpenELEC (Gotham B4, IIRC) on a thumbdrive and powering on and off with the remote worked. I then installed Ubuntu Server (similar to minimal install) and a barebones install of XBMC. I still have do the workaround of unloading the driver, adding "auto", and then reloading the driver when I boot, but it works nonetheless.