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(Originally had this in Advice but felt this place was more its flavor)
Let me start by saying I loathe house rules. I understand some of them sometimes, but I try to shy away from the big game-altering ones as I feel people more qualified than myself have poured their intelligence and experience into the rules in my books, and they know more about balance than I do.
But spell resistance has got to get got.
As written, spell resistance almost provides more of a detriment to a PC than a boon. Sure it makes it hard to target a character with a big bad spell, but it also makes it hard to target a character with a sugar sweet spell, like haste or your various cure wounds spells. A character could lower it, sure, but that requires a standard action and to keep it lowered requires continuous burning of standard actions each round, effectively letting you do nothing except move.
Monks, a class already designed to turn on "hard mode" for players playing as one, get this as a class ability eventually, forcing them to behave this way or risk not being cured, not being hasted, or not being zapped out of a dangerous situation when he resists the teleport spell the party wizard casts. A class ability shouldn't make a character worse, or at the least, harder to play, so I'm curious as to how people have house ruled this in their games. So far from browsing the boards I've come upon these methods:
1) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a standard action like normal, but have it "reset" not at the beginning of next turn, but rather at the discretion of the player.
2) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a swift or immediate action, the latter of which would rob a character of his next swift action next round.
3) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a free action, basically treating it the same way that saving throws can be purposefully failed. I believe this is the way James Jacobs himself plays it in his games.
4) Allow spells that have "(harmless)" at the ends of their SR entries to bypass spell resistance if the character so chooses.
Any one else with 2cp or similar house rules?
Making it a move action to lower instead of standard is another way to soften the impact while still preserving the effect.
That said, I don't know many players who would refuse SR for this reason. It's still easily a net-benefit, and moreso if you face a lot of casters.
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I searched for this topic on these threads in Google and got several years worth of posts of people complaining about this. I haven't had to contend with it yet in any of my games, but I do notice it as an issue. James Jacobs agrees its an issue, but he and Jason Bulmahn differ on just how big an issue it is, which is why it wasn't fixed when 3.x was converted to Pathfinder.
3) Allow the lowering of Spell Resistance as a free action, basically treating it the same way that saving throws can be purposefully failed. I believe this is the way James Jacobs himself plays it in his games.
That's pretty much how I do it, too:
Spell resistance, as from a racial or class feature, can be selectively lowered against specific incoming spells at will. This does not require an action. If you do not know what spell a dubious ally is casting on you (for example, by using the Spellcraft skill) you must decide blindly whether or not to allow the spell past your SR.