Comment 4 for bug 991116

I just looked at conf file from 12.04 machine and it had
REMOTE_MODULES="lirc_dev mceusb"

so after changing I was able to restart lirc with out the errors. When I ran irexec the previous error stopped happening.

So you might want to try restarting lirc incase any errors come up with this command
sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart