Update: it's been a long time since I bothered Freehand tech support with a phone call asking when a fix would be coming for OS v4.0.6 and the XMMS media player in particular so I did yesterday. I got a reply last night that they have no intention of fixing the problems, which are apparently related more to the hardware rather than the OS. They said they knew that wasn't what I or anyone else wanted to hear but that was that.
I can't say anything worse about Freehand that they haven't already said for themselves. They sell faulty products, period. This must be why some retailers were dumping MPP's so cheap recently.