Well, the good news is that lirc 0.8.5 has incorporated the pad2keys patch so you no longer have to apply it separately. The bad news is that the button codes changed but the supplied lircd.conf.imon-pad was not updated accordingly. After a lot of pain, I managed to get a new, working version. I have submitted it to the lirc maintainers and also filed a Sourceforge bug/patch with it. For some reason the forum is not accepting any of the files I'm attempting to attach (complains about the extension; even .txt didn't work). Note that it is missing the Antec Fusion Wheel remote definition which was in the older file, so if you need that, you might have to re-add it. I ran out of time and patience to test re-adding it.
The other thing with 0.8.5 is that if you have the old style VFD (my usb id is 15c2:ffdc), you will need to add the kernel module option "options lirc_imon display_type=1" in /etc/modprobe.d/lirc (or wherever your distro puts it) and also comment out the pad2keys_active line if you had it in there.
Hopefully this will save some people the annoyance I've endured.

