Good news and bad news.
The good: We followed the instructions found here to resolve the "blinking light of death" problem. Replacing the 4 capacitors was cheap, a friend did the soldering, and I saved $1000 in repairs.
Recently, I had Comcast replace the remote for the cable box (our 1 year old Collie chewed the end off of the old one), and we successfully connected the remote with the 3 devices we needed to: the TV, the audio receiver/amp, and the cable box.
All was well, until recently.