FWIW:

I received a bug report regarding the USB Drivers, indicating that emptool fails to connect to the empeg on the initial attempt after loading the driver as a module. Thereafter, it seems to do just fine (at least on my hardware). The work-around, for the moment, is to load the driver, attempt a connection, quit the attempt using ^c or just let it time out, and then attempt the connection again. The solution to the problem exists, but implementing the fix breaks a lot of other stuff.