Also, there are plenty of multi-card readers which don't work properly, and again I hunted down one that does, again beautifully.
I found this to be true as well, mainly the cheaper ones. I finally bought a nice Lexar UDMA reader that works very well... transfer rate is a little slower than I hoped and CPU use is somewhat high for DMA, but I fear this may just be the nature of USB over Zorro. Sure as hell beats the internal IDE, anyway.