fwcontrol -R is broken, need help, urgent

[Dieter BSD]

I use fwcontrol -S a lot, but almost never use -R.
But suddenly I have a urgent need for -R and it is broken.

FreeBSD 8.2
AMD64
<VIA Fire II (VT6306)> port 0xa800-0xa87f mem 0xfdffe000-0xfdffe7ff irq 18
 at device 6.0 on pci1
<NEC uPD72871/2> mem 0xfdeff000-0xfdefffff irq 19 at device 8.0 on pci2
Canon DV camcorder

Looks like my fwcontrol is 8.0 sources compiled with 7.1 compiler
since fwcontrol compiled with 8.x compiler panics kernel.
(IIRC, there is a PR or 2 about this.)

"fwcontrol -R foo.dv" gives:
fwcontrol: detect_recv_fn: ioctl FW_SSTBUF: Bad file descriptor

I tried both controllers (-u 0, -u 1), same result.

I know that -R worked under 6.x with the VIA controller.
(Still can't do -S with the VIA due to the cyclemaster PR.)
I'm fairly sure that -R worked with the NEC under 6.x and 7.x.

One change is that I moved the computer and there are now
three repeaters between the controller and the camcorder.
But data is obviously able to go both directions, so they
shouldn't matter, right?  -S works fine with the repeaters.

VIA:
fwcontrol -u 0 -t
crc_len: 7 generation:2 node_count:5 sid_count:5
id link gap_cnt speed delay cIRM power port0 port1 port2 ini more
00    1       5  S400     1   15W     -     P         0    0
01    0      63  S400     0    0W     C     -     P   0    0
02    0      63  S400     0    0W     C     P         1    0
03    0      63  S400     0    0W     C     P         0    0
04    1      63  S100     1    0W     -     C         0    0

NEC:
fwcontrol -u 1 -t
crc_len: 7 generation:117 node_count:5 sid_count:5
id link gap_cnt speed delay cIRM power port0 port1 port2 ini more
00    1      10  S400     1   -9W     P     -         1    0
01    0      10  S400     0    0W     C     -     P   0    0
02    0      10  S400     0    0W     C     P         0    0
03    0      10  S400     0    0W     C     P         0    0
04    1      63  S100     1    0W     -     C         0    0