Well, I finally switched back to the official builds of XBMC (well, semi-official).
Now, since my previous and my current media center doesn’t come with a remote like, say a Boxee box, I built myself a custom one using a Hama MCE Remote Control and a Logitech Harmony 300. After trying a bunch of things (it actually works like a standard mouse), I stumbled upon this Trac ticket.
After first wrangling the sources into a patch, sometime ago when I switched to a new media center I started using the official builds as I mentioned earlier.
One disadvantage of the official builds is, that I can’t patch in the event client. Eventually I decided to write a small debian package containing everything the event client previously had.