We are looking at a considerable amount of work here, including a lot of research into the low level HID/USB protocol stuff. Even at a significantly reduced rate of, say $75/hr and a cap on the development time of 40hrs, we are looking at $3000 total. The work will require Thom to purchase out of his fee a specific USB protocol analyser to get down into the HID packets and determine exactly what is being sent for those "Dead Buttons" so that he can adapt/develop the driver code to receive, parse and respond to them correctly. One of these analysers delivered is around $500 minimum.
So we can see that if we assumed an average donation of $100 per person (which is starting to look somewhat optimistic, but was based on some of the earlier posts), we would need at least 30 people to contribute. Unfortunately, this project is quite a complex one, so I'm not sure there is anyway we can reduce this cost simply because the hours don't come down easily. Lets see how we go in this thread gathering interested members.