What I ended up doing was still forcing the player to press a button to get past the first screen of the UI, but instead of a click it is now responding to the Start button on the gamepad; and when the player presses Start I call [FONT=Lucida Console]SetFocusToGameViewport. fixes the problem.
It’s worth noting though that the will happen again whenever focus leaves the viewport; so if a player Alt-Tab’s away and back to the game, then [FONT=Lucida Console]SetFocusToGameViewport will need to get called again.