Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver (MCE) and OpenELEC 6: buttons not working

Since the upgrade to OpenELEC 6.0, I think there were some changes in the kernel regarding usbhid that causes this Windows Media Remoteclone  to behave strangely sometimes on boot (guessing due to race condition) where some keys (especially OK) do not work on the remote. The transceiver portion of the device identifies itself as:

lsusb
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 147a:e03a Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. eHome Infrared Receiver
Kernel buffer (dmesg)
New USB device found, idVendor=147a, idProduct=e03a
New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Product: eHome Infrared Transceiver
Manufacturer: Formosa21

You may see the following error messages in your kernel buffer when buttons aren't working:

hid-generic 0003:147A:E03A.0001: timeout initializing reports
mceusb  Error: urb status = -71

To resolve this error, mount /flash partition as read/write and added the following string to /flash/cmdline.txt:

usbhid.quirks=0x147A:0xE03A:0x20000000

This activates the HID_QUIRK_NO_INIT_REPORTS (0x20000000) quirk which resolves the timeout error and allows lirc to bind properly to the USB device.