Nothing particularly interesting appears on the telnet console either

Try starting emphatic with the -d (debug) option. I tried to cut down on the number of things I was printing in non-debug mode to avoid slowdowns when the serial port gets clogged with meaningless print statements. The -d output should give me *some* clue as to what's going on.

A couple sanity checks though...
1) The lyrics were available using v1.01?
2) You used lrc2sylt to add the lyrics? v1.01 actually allowed Lyrics3 tags, by accident... So if you used some Winamp plugin to add Lyrics3 tags, instead of my lrc2sylt utility, those files would show lyrics in 1.01, but not in 1.10, which uses a new ID3 library.