Perhaps I'm more used to a Topfield SD box box (with third party software) that works far better when setting up timers - nearly a TeraByte of recordings with a handful of repeats However, avoiding repeats isn't really the problem - I can tweak the timer configurations on the Miraclebox. My Topfield box also allows me to stop any current recording and it remembers that it has been stopped. As ronand has confirmed disabling a current recording that has been set by a still active auto-timer isn't a one button press operation on the Miraclebox/VIX image. I'll just have to work around this limitation of the box.
BTW - for info: while 'messing around' with some of the default timer settings and trying to stop active recordings my box got slower and slower with the spinning VIX image often up for 30+ seconds. Speed was only restored by putting the box into deep standby and rebooting.