Ah! Found it!!! (I think...)
I bet for those who are having this problem (Dragi and Bruno, among others) your [empwake] section is the *last* section in your config.ini.
Errr, I hate to tell you that, but it isn't.

I'll give the new version a try in a moment...
No luck with 0.983, either. Identical behavior. However, I noticed that empwake unpacked from empwake-0.983.tar.gz (Apr 18 17:28 ) has modification date of Apr 16 08:00. Perhaps you packed an old version of the executable? Here are checksums:
empeg_masni:/tmp# cksum empwa*
49511689 130526 empwake
343311917 39992 empwake-0.98.tar.gz
3540631779 40101 empwake-0.981.tar.gz
1059658219 40784 empwake-0.983.tar.gz
Cheers!