USB PCI card in a G4

Few days ago I bought a somewhat generic USB 2.0 PCI card to put in my Quicksilver 2002. The card was listed as being compatible with Mac OS X, it has 4 external connectors, 1 internal (what does one do with that?), is using a VIA 6212L controller chip and was fairly inexpensive (~$7 + $6 for shipping) (of course now I have found a similar deal on a better candidate).

After some googling I found this link here for drivers for the card.

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=2&OSID=23&CatID=2470

There I also found out that this card is really only supported in G4 running 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3 and since I'm running 10.3.9, I was really happy. That didn't last very long.

First I put the card in slot 4 without installing the drivers (I have a Sweet G3 in slot 5). The profiler didn't see it. Installed the drivers, and still nothing.
Moved the card to slot 3 (and then later to 5 after removing Sweet G3) and then the card is detected. If I remove the two .ktext files that the installer put in, it is listed as an Apple USB card (obviously) but if the drivers are there, it is listed as a VIA card.

This is what the profiler list:

UHCI Root Hub Simulation:

Vendor Name: VIA Technologies, Inc.
Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec
Product ID: 32773 ($8005)
Bus Power (mA): 500

UHCI Root Hub Simulation:

Vendor Name: VIA Technologies, Inc.
Product ID: 32773 ($8005)
Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec
Bus Power (mA): 500

USB High-Speed Bus:

Vendor Name: VIA Technologies, Inc.
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Product ID: 32774 ($8006)
Bus Power (mA): 500

Now the really bad stuff.

If I hook a USB thumb drive up, it shows up. It takes a while to show up but it does. I didn't do anything else since I had some better tests in mind.
Test number 2 was a Pentax Optio camera which I normally hook up to the onboard USB but the camera has USB 2.0. It shows up, again it takes a while. iPhoto is launched and it sees the pictures, and it takes for ever to download them. Looks like the link is running at 1.5 Mb/s. Definitely slower than the onboard 12Mb/s.
Test number 3 is a video iPod (60MB, can't remember what generation that is). No show. It doesn't show up and when I refresh the profiler it stalls until the iPod is disconnected. Same thing with Disk Utility. It stalls also while collecting information on the volumes (or maybe it is still collecting the data from the drive and I'm just to impatient).

I'm stuck. There are reports out there on these cards that they do work (maybe they just showed up like mine but didn't really work) but it may have been using older versions of OS X 10.3.x. If I remove the two .ktext files that the VIA installer installed, the card just show up in the profiler but doesn't work (not surprisingly) so skipping the drivers isn't an option (somebody claims that these drivers are not so good, which I think I may have a proof for).

Any ideas besides relegating the card to a PC that is being assembled? I just want to make sure that I'm not missing something obvious. Should I try the remaining PCI slot that I haven't tried already (slot 2)? Again, removing the Sweet G3 didn't help (anyone needs one?). I haven't tried to contact VIA since I doubt that will lead to anything (I mean the computer is 5 years old, and the OS is ~3 years old).

Thanks

IC