Is anyone here using this ESP8266 IOT module?

I have finally gotten it to work, but it was non-trivial. It is supposed to communicate via UART at 115200 baud. It eventually does, but on startup it puts out a bunch of status info at 74600 baud (determined by using my scope) before switching to 115200 for the UI. It really does this, I have verified by sending it to a terminal emulator and if I set the baud at 74600, the status info comes out correct, but the ready message is garbled. If it set it to 115200, it is reversed. Only the ready message comes out non-garbled. I now have it working controlled by a micro by setting the speed to 115200 and ignoring everything until I see "ready<cr><lf>". The status info shows the date of Jan 8 2013, which I presume is the firmware version, so quite old.
Is this normal , or did it get a batch with a bogus version of the firmware installed? If others have used this and do not see this anomaly, I might try to re-program one of them with a newer version of the firmware, but I would like to know if that will change anything before I waste my time trying it.
Bob

I have finally gotten it to work, but it was non-trivial. It is supposed to communicate via UART at 115200 baud. It eventually does, but on startup it puts out a bunch of status info at 74600 baud (determined by using my scope) before switching to 115200 for the UI. It really does this, I have verified by sending it to a terminal emulator and if I set the baud at 74600, the status info comes out correct, but the ready message is garbled. If it set it to 115200, it is reversed. Only the ready message comes out non-garbled. I now have it working controlled by a micro by setting the speed to 115200 and ignoring everything until I see "ready<cr><lf>". The status info shows the date of Jan 8 2013, which I presume is the firmware version, so quite old.
Is this normal , or did it get a batch with a bogus version of the firmware installed? If others have used this and do not see this anomaly, I might try to re-program one of them with a newer version of the firmware, but I would like to know if that will change anything before I waste my time trying it.
Bob