[f1vefour]

However it has been a little flaky for a good while. If I reboot the RPi it often won't work and I have to reboot again (sometimes more than once) to get it working.
I've also noticed that not overclocking seems to make it work on boot more often than not. All a little strange

I think it's likely to be an OpenElec issue mostly, but currently the OE devs don't seem that concerned about fixing it.

And I have a separate issue too that when I have TVHeadend enabled with a USB TV device - the IR remote becomes very erratic and misses most of the presses, which makes it all very nearly unworkable. This was not a problem with early Gotham builds nor Frodo, so again something that needs to be fixed.

It's not an OE issue it's the lirc_rpi kernel module, check dmesg when it happens and you should see some debugging messages about lirc_rpi. I believe the lirc_rpi module code needs some messaging to make it more compatible with newer kernel revisions.