I've at this point resorted to creating .nfo file prior to adding items to xbmc, and manually removing "the, a, an" etc from the necessary parts (sort title, title, etc), before finally adding to XBMC. That way the remote doesn't (obviously) even get the articles to work against... It's becomes quite irritating given that a large portion of English items start with "The" (or "A" or "An")...