Enable and disable a Broadcast Receiver

Well, what you basically have seems OK. I have the following code in one of my projects:

boolean enabled=prefs.getBoolean(key, false);
int flag=(enabled ?
            PackageManager.COMPONENT_ENABLED_STATE_ENABLED :
            PackageManager.COMPONENT_ENABLED_STATE_DISABLED);
ComponentName component=new ComponentName(EditPreferences.this, OnBootReceiver.class);

getPackageManager()
    .setComponentEnabledSetting(component, flag,
                                PackageManager.DONT_KILL_APP);

I use this to disable a BOOT_COMPLETED receiver when I don't have any active alarms that need to be scheduled.

My guess is that your ComponentName is not set up properly (e.g., your leading .). Try the constructor that I am using, that takes a Context and a Class as parameters.

I think using the PackageManager is over-thinking your situation. You have a BroadcastReceiver that needs to sometimes ignore the broadcasts it's listening for. I can think of two easy ways to go about this:

1) Set a flag that your receiver can check to ignore or accept broadcasts, and don't worry about enabling/disabling it at all.

2) Create the BroadcastReceiver programmatically (can just be an inner class, even), and register and unregister it as you need at given parts of your application.

In general I've found that defining my BroadcastReceivers in code instead of XML has provided a lot more flexibility and is generally easier for me to manage.