I just played around with the source package a bit. I tried removing some Ubuntu patches, to see if it helped, specifically, lirc_dev-2.6.33.patch and appleir_repeat_issue.patch. I removed first one and then the other, but installing the resultant packages did not fix the bug. Hence, it may be related to the kernel more than lirc. Note that the version of lirc shipped in Karmic is the same upstream, just with different patches, hence my hope that removing recently applied patches might help.
I just played around with the source package a bit. I tried removing some Ubuntu patches, to see if it helped, specifically, lirc_dev- 2.6.33. patch and appleir_ repeat_ issue.patch. I removed first one and then the other, but installing the resultant packages did not fix the bug. Hence, it may be related to the kernel more than lirc. Note that the version of lirc shipped in Karmic is the same upstream, just with different patches, hence my hope that removing recently applied patches might help.