lirc and usb-uirt

[David Kramer <david thekramers net>]

I'm trying to set up a usb-uirt (http://www.usbuirt.com) on my
up-to-date F8 box with a 2.6.23.9-85.fc8 kernel and lirc-0.8.2-2.fc8 I'm
installing MythTV on.

When I start lircd I see no errors, but when I run irw, I see

[root janus ~]# lircd -n -d /dev/ttyUSB0 --driver=usb_uirt_raw
lircd-0.8.2[10913]: lircd(userspace) ready
lircd-0.8.2[10913]: accepted new client on /dev/lircd
lircd-0.8.2[10913]: uirt2_raw: checksum error
lircd-0.8.2[10913]: uirt2_raw: UIRT version 0905 ok
lircd-0.8.2[10913]: uirt2_raw: could not set DTR
lircd-0.8.2[10913]: caught signal

Poking around, this sounds like an old bug somewhere upstream (kernel):
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/293503

Is there any way to track down this problem?
Is it really broken from back to the 2.6.22 kernels?
Anything I can do about it?

Thanks.