Hi mate.  I also had a lot of trouble updating firmware from V1.0 – latest.  After multiple attempts with both my Mac and PC with XP I was able to get it to work on my Mac with 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

I found with the firmware is was halting during the update process on both computers at about 5%.

One thing for sure you should definitely do if you haven't already is unplug everything that is USB except for mouse and keyboard, timefactor and do a fresh restart to aviod any USB driver conflicts.

Can you start up the librarian without the TF connected?  Seeing that both firmware and librarian don't work it looks like you could have a driver conflict or something.

 I've also read multiple threads with people having trouble with Macos 10.4 Tiger as I believe it is not supported.