m-audio suckage

So, I bought a used m-audio FireWire 1814 off ebay. It's a super cool little box that's supposed to just plug in and give you awesome audio in/out stuff for recording and other stuff. Sounds great and it works pretty darn well when I bootcamp my Mac into Windows. Except that unlike every other firewire device I've ever worked with, this one expects you to reboot before connecting or disconnecting things. Well, isn't that lame? And I'm not supposed to use my wifi or bluetooth at the same time? WTF?! Better still it doesn't appear to work at all with my Mac. This post marks the fourth interaction I've made with their tech support guys. While they seem to want to help me, they sure don't have much to offer. Toggle the sync method? What the hell? Who wrote these drivers?! Update: apparently the Mac upgrades stomp on things somewhat, so you need to run the Apple disk repair thing which goes around and fixes permissions. Ugh. Generally I love Apple, but this is kinda lame.