I'm guessing your HDMI pass through is set to 'on'
97°, give or take a few degrees, is about what it should be with the transformers energized.
Mine reads 95° when on.

I disabled HDMI pass through and my 976 remains cold in standby mode. This solves my problem. A HUGE thank you to Helson for finding this!

Glad that was all it was.

Id still be concerned if indeed you were seeing 115 degrees !
Sounds as if 95 might be the norm. 115 is considerably hotter than 95 !

115° is definitely hotter than it should be inside your cabinet.
Is the fan you're using pulling the hot air out from the top of its shelf location? It should be.
You may want to experiment with fan location to try and achieve the best results for cooling.

95-115 is warm but nothing to be overly concerned about. Consumer grade electronics is spec'd to run at least to 85 C which is about 185 F. Electronics will happily run for a long time at a constant temp even if it's a high temp as long as the humidity is not overly high, say 65% or higher.

The other main killer of electronics is thermal shock. That is a rapid change from really high temperature to really low temperature. (e.g. -40 to +85 C in approx. 10 seconds). You better not be seeing these temp ranges in your house

It would be interesting to know what validation test Outlaw ran the unit through.

Just an FYI from an old submariner here. While pulling hot air out may provide sufficient cooling in typical HT applications, you will have better air displacement in a closed space by forcing cool air in than you will pulling hot air out.

I've heard both schools of thought on this. How cool is the ambient temp? How efficient are the fans? Does that matter?
I'm thinking a small fan should be used in combination with the radiation cooling that it's already been designed to accomplish on its own. Pulling hot air out, allows the cool air to be pulled in from the bottom vents, as its designed to do. Pushing air down into the device, well, where is the heated air going? Back upward. It just seems the heated air would be fighting the air being pushed down into the unit.
You may be right, or either way is just as effective. We can agree, cooling fans make a difference where radiational cooling isn't enough.

Using a small fan to remove the heat from the cabinet will extend the life of your equipment. Although the devices are designed to operate at a elevated temperature for a certain amount of time we can extend that time by never operating there. Pulling the heat out of the equipment is the key. Since heat naturally rises, pulling the air from the top is going to work best.

Oh you wouldn't place a fan pushing cool air in at the top. You're right, that would seriously mess with the thermal flows in the system. A fan blowing cooler air in would be placed lower in the cabinet. I didn't mean to imply one should just reverse the fan direction on top, although I can see where it might read that way.

My guess is that, given the sheer amount of top mount fans available for HT racks, that pulling hot air out works just fine for that particular application. I was just sharing some practical application knowledge. To get the best exchange of air in a space, you move more pushing air in vs. pulling it out. Burn dinner? Set the fan up to blow clean air into the space instead of setting it in the open doorway or window blowing outward.