If I hook up my cable box through the 1070 will it have to be on to watch tv. I really dont want to turn on a receiver so my kids can watch sponge bob.

It depends somewhat on how you hook it up, but the short answer is "most likely, yes."

My standard advise for people setting up a new home theater and contemplating keeping some connections in place so that they can watch TV without the receiver being on is this: you can do it, but it quickly starts to get complicated to operate - which typically makes the family unhappy. Using the 1070 all the time will in most cases allow it to handle the video switching automatically (nobody has to know to change the TV input to watch a different source), for example. If you really do want to be able to fire up the cable box without bringing the 1070 into the mix, though, we can come up with a wiring scheme that will do it. If you can post what your cable box offers in the way of outputs and what your TV offers in the way of inputs, we can kick some ideas around.

You could simply run coax from the cable box to the TV, if I'm not mistaken, and then have the kids just turn on TV and use the TV's tuner, couldn't you? And then if you're using DVI/Component on another TV input, use that in combination w/ the 1070 for when you're HT'ing.

Many cable box's won't pass through the original signal. You can split the coax before the cable box and go to both, at which point you can use the TV's tuner for any analog cable channels. If the goal is to watch a digital cable channel (my 2-year-old daughter watches Noggin some on the weekends) or features like On Demand or DVR, then you can use the cable box's coax output, set the TV on channel 3 or 4, and use the cable box. At that point, you could also (possibly more easily) use composite or s-video and analog audio from the cable box to the TV and have the same result.

I didnt even think of that. I could just run a composite video from my cable box to the tv and run the hdmi from the cable box to the reciever and then to the tv to watch movies and such.