I have Hijack v293 installed at the moment, and hijack won't autoupdate for me either. In my case ftp seems to be broken too though. I can open an ftp connection to the empeg, and some commands such as cd, pwd and ? work, but ls and dir return:
500 Bad Command
200 Okay
150 Openning Data Connection
and then it just sits there doing nothing until I kill the session.

I don't have any kftpd_passwork line in my config.ini either. Here is what I do have in the Hijack section:
[output]
notify=1
[hijack]
temperature_correction=-3
suppress_notify=1
disable_bass_boostFM=1
volume_boost_FM=6
volume_boost_AM=-2
kftpd_show_dotfiles=1
khttpd_show_dotfiles=1

I'm running Mac OS X, but that shouldn't really effect anything here. Any suggestions (apart from loading the newest Hijack over serial - can't get to a machine with a serial port for a couple of weeks ...).