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I just got to spend the better part of half an hour figuring out how to program a universal remote to work with our finicky TV and our DVD/VCR combo, both of which are about seven years old. Yay. 
After much struggling with the remote's "improvement" feature (where it goes through the different signals it knows for the device you're attempting to program until it stumbles across the correct one) and trying to figure out how to make the skip and fast forward/rewind buttons to actually act like they're supposed to, I've got it mostly working. It doesn't have an eject button, so we get to pick one of the buttons we're not planning to use and have it learn that from the old remote. It also doesn't have a zoom button, so we'll have to do that too if we want to be able to zoom in on DVD credits on our rather small TV. Other than that, though, it seems to be working.
And I suspect the cause of all this is simply dropping the old DVD/VCR remote one too many times. It had been having buttons do the wrong command for a while, usually just a button press like selecting an option in the menu or skipping a scene causing the movie to stop instead. But a couple of days ago, the remote randomly started flipping to the DVD system menu whenever we'd hit a button, and sometimes when we wouldn't. It got to the point where we couldn't even select options in the DVD root menu without it going to the system menu, and pressing "play" did the same thing. We narrowed it down to the remote after we pulled the batteries out and everything worked fine (and no, fresh batteries didn't fix the problem). Sure, we could still watch DVDs without the remote, but where's the fun in that when you can't navigate the menu (or, heaven forbid, get past Disney's FastPlay feature)?
So for now, universal remote it is, and we just have to use the buttons on the unit's front to eject our movies or switch to the VCR side. It'll switch back to the DVD side with the remote just fine, but for some reason won't switch to VCR. Go figure.
After much struggling with the remote's "improvement" feature (where it goes through the different signals it knows for the device you're attempting to program until it stumbles across the correct one) and trying to figure out how to make the skip and fast forward/rewind buttons to actually act like they're supposed to, I've got it mostly working. It doesn't have an eject button, so we get to pick one of the buttons we're not planning to use and have it learn that from the old remote. It also doesn't have a zoom button, so we'll have to do that too if we want to be able to zoom in on DVD credits on our rather small TV. Other than that, though, it seems to be working.
And I suspect the cause of all this is simply dropping the old DVD/VCR remote one too many times. It had been having buttons do the wrong command for a while, usually just a button press like selecting an option in the menu or skipping a scene causing the movie to stop instead. But a couple of days ago, the remote randomly started flipping to the DVD system menu whenever we'd hit a button, and sometimes when we wouldn't. It got to the point where we couldn't even select options in the DVD root menu without it going to the system menu, and pressing "play" did the same thing. We narrowed it down to the remote after we pulled the batteries out and everything worked fine (and no, fresh batteries didn't fix the problem). Sure, we could still watch DVDs without the remote, but where's the fun in that when you can't navigate the menu (or, heaven forbid, get past Disney's FastPlay feature)?
So for now, universal remote it is, and we just have to use the buttons on the unit's front to eject our movies or switch to the VCR side. It'll switch back to the DVD side with the remote just fine, but for some reason won't switch to VCR. Go figure.