I would suggest trying LinuxMCE 12.04, and then talking either here in the forum, or on #linuxmce in irc.freenode.net on IRC, so we can help get this resolved. There hasn't been very much maintenance on the LIRC_DCE driver, and we need to make sure to get this working for most transcievers, again.
Can you tell me what you have for your IR transciever, and what the USB ID is etc, so that we can determine if a device template needs to be made for it?
-Thom