Seamless power on/off of components, how do you do it?

I've finally gotten my system stable, and almost all kinks have been worked out. I am left with one daunting situation, as my title suggests.

If it were just me in the home, I would not have any issues with the system running as it does. However... I have a wife and small children that will soon learn to use the remote for themselves. The situation I face is sometimes my components just get out of sync with the power states. Here is what I have:

HTPC of course
Onkyo receiver
Samsung lcd tv
Playstation 3
Controlled by Harmony ir remote

Things usually go pretty well. But there is that occasion that my wife is yelling at me because she cant get the tv to work. And its usually because the tv/avr is on, but the htpc is not, or vice versa. The if remote is usually the culprit, because if you dont have it aimed just so, some component will not get the power on signal. For me it's easy, look at the power lights and figure out which one I need to turn on. This is a bit cumbersome, because you need to go through a couple menus on the remote and select the right source to turn on, then flip back in the menu to get back to the right activity.

Ideally I would like one component to receive all power commands, and then relay the appropriate command to the remaining components, powering on/off and switching inputs as needed. But I'm not sure exactly how to do this. I have read about this , and it may be what i need. However, I'm not sure exactly how it works. If anyone uses something like this, can you clue me in on how to set it up?

And just a thought about the cec device, what I'm worried would happen is that everytime the htpc wakes up for some scheduled task, that my avr and tv would also turn on. This could cause windows event sounds or even tv playback to go off at 3am. I dont know though.

Thanks for any help!

Thanks but don't think that would work. I don't want TV and avr coming on every time the HTPC wakes up.

I ordered the rcaware device so I will update once I get it sorted out. This should allow me to use eventghost to ignore scheduled wakes and keep things in sync.