Yes, I think so.
I found the solution by wild guess. When I tried to make one node containing both the alpha and constant shaders it failed. It was using one bitmap set to "DIFFUSEMAP". I separated into an alpha and constant node and still had trouble til I noticed the unofficial update bitmap had "ALPHAMAP" for it's usage. After that the alpha started working properly and I made the guess of setting the usage for the constant to "CONSTANTMAP" and that solved the last problem. This was several hours of frustration and crashes . I'm glad it's over, now I can get back to finishing this thing.
I think the alpha just needed to be blank for it's usage to work, but I believe I added the ALPHAMAP usage so the Collada export could see it properly or maybe it was my modified collada export made use of it. The TextureAlpha shader from Caligari has a blank usage.
One more bug I found is that the Saturate node in the Components - Operators library doesn't load. It just errors out. No way to fix that one though.