Borislav sent me a patch a while ago (Thank You Borislav). I tried it out on linux-2.4.0t12p3, and it seems to fix the problem with the initial use after loading the module. I didn't try it out on a 2.2.x kernel yet (I should be asleep right now), so if you are running a 2.2.x kernel, please try this one out, and let me know if it doesn't play nice, or if it does for that matter. It would be interesting to see what transfer rates people are experiencing with this driver. Currently, I'm seeing ~400kB/s; though there was one report of ~55kB/s.

The attachment is a zip'd tar file containing (because the bbs doesn't understand gzip):

patch-empeg-2.2.18.24 (applies against linux-2.2.18-pre24)
patch-empeg-2.4.0.12.3 (applies against linux-2.4.0-test12-pre3)