Onkyo remote control frustration

[Eidolon]

I have an older onkyo receiver, one of the first ones to do hdmi/3d passthrough.

There's an ongoing issue with the remote, that is guess is fairly common for all of these.
This remote is designed so that it can operate a number of different devices, by selecting one of these buttons along the top of the remote. One of these is for 'Receiver', and I'd assume that it should have stayed defaulted to it.

If only.

I'm sick of trying to sometimes change things on the receiver via the remote, only for it to, for some reason, have seemingly changed what device it's talking to.
It persistently keeps turning my dvd/VHS combo machine on instead of talking to the receiver.
Last night I was actually using said combo machine, and pressed a button on the onkyo remote and it turned the combo off while I was still using it.

I'm utterly sick of this and out patience with it. Does anyone know any way to do something with the the remote to disable it's ability to talk to things over than the receiver?

Thanks.