From: "Frank Haber" 

Yeah, I've seen that firewire instance bring grief to a couple of XP
machines. I agree that just disabling it seems a safe course, and a cure
for me, too. Spurious bridges, though, I usually delete.  Any contrary
opinions?

This stuff seems to be a weakness in XP.  I've seen the bridges, at least,
on the machines of users who wouldn't know HOW to play or tweak.  Must be a
driver-installation thingie. The worst occurrences, if they don't disable
connectivity, seem to totally disable DHCP-ing to a new net connection. 
Even WNTIPCFG shows a peculiar NIC name, and the NATted IP is locked - you
get a flicker, and the old IP comes up when you "renew."

Sony's the only OEM I know of that actually uses firewire networking.  I
think some of their later machines used TCP over Ilink, actually.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-4