Thanks for reading the manual, John, you've solved my problem as well. I can confirm that the "problem" or strange design choice of defaulting the Extended Surround setting to Auto upon shutdown persists with the 663 model as well (I don't get it, Auto seems to do exactly nothing nothing anyway, so far it has never added rear surrounds unless program material is already encoded in 7.1, as if Auto is defined as: automatically decode program material as encoded, which seems to nullify the concept of "Extended Surround"); however, your solution does work for the HDMI audio input, even though the 663 manual continues to refer to "Digital Inputs" only with regard to the "Last" setting (perhaps the rubric "Digital" is meant to include coax, optical, and also HDMI?). I just tried the Last setting and it did override the default-Ex.-Surrounds-to-Auto-upon-powerdown setting; i.e., using the Harmony One remote, I powered everything off and then back on, and the PLIIx setting held for the Extended Surrounds.
I have to wait until Saturdays now to experiment with anything/work to correct settings, it sure has been getting old setting the Extended Surround menu option upon each power up, now I am a happy camper.
