Linux Infrared Remote Control

I've been trying to get lirc working with an MCE remote and USB IR 
Receiver (eData DEC-200B), but I am having no luck.  I'm running debian 
4.0 (and I've tried this on debian unstable as well) and compiled the 
lirc_mceusb* drivers.  Everything is installed from the debian 
distribution (kernel, lirc, module-source, etc).

I'm running udev and after initial installation I see:
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 61, 0 Apr 22 21:45 /dev/lirc
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root     0 Apr 25 07:50 /dev/lircd
prw-rw-rw- 1 root root     0 Apr 22 21:45 /dev/lircm

However, when I reboot the system, all I see is:
srw-rw-rw- 1 root root     0 Apr 25 07:50 /dev/lircd

I modprobe lirc_mceusb2 and I can see from dmesg that the modules 
(lirc_dev & lirc_mceusb2) load, but there still isn't a /dev/lirc.  I 
went ahead and ran mode2, and got this error:
mode2: error opening /dev/lirc
mode2: No such device

So I tried:

mknod /dev/lirc c 61 0

And re-ran mode2, but still I got the same error.  I've tried the 
lirc_mceusb driver as well, but got the same results as above.  These 
leads me to think a few things:
A) The IR Receiver doesn't work in Linux.  Hhowever I seen multiple 
posts that says it works just fine without any problems in Linux, so I 
don't think that's it.
B) The IR Receiver is broken.  It's brand new so while this is possible, 
it seems unlikely.
C) I'm missing something in the setup/configuration.

I've done extensive google searches, but nothing I have found has 
changed the results I've gotten.  Can anyone help me out?

Rob