Lockup during boot attempting to install FreeBSD5.3 on a Dell Inspiron 2500

[Driver Developer]

Attempting to install FreeBSD 5.3 on my company laptop (Dell Inspiron 2500)
I am facing a lockup prior to getting to sysinstall. In fact, during the 
default kernel boot,
the system locks up right after printing these lines:

cbb0: ...
cardbus0: ....
pccard0: ....

I tried booting without ACPI, booting "safe mode", but no option in the menu 
helped.
I then googled for similar problem (for a couple of hours) and exhaustively 
tested
ALL combinations of the following:

set hw.eisa_slots=0
set hint.acpi.0.disabled=1
set hint.pcic.0.disabled=1
set hw.pci.enable_io_modes=1
set hw.pci.do_powerstate=0

(setting them from option 6, and then typing: boot)

Nothing helped. Eventually, I realized that the lockup occurs while probing 
PCMCIA cards
(inside the pccard device driver?) so I removed the two plastic 
place-holders inside
the two PCMCIA slots (they don't seem to bother linux/windowsXP).

Lo and behold, it moved: It passed through the ...

pccard0:...

line and locked up a couple of lines later:

pcib2: <PCI-PCI bridge> at device 11.0 on pci1
pci2: <PCI bus> on pcib2

Perhaps there's a way I can disable probing of this PCI bus? (using lspci 
from Linux verified
that no cards seem to exist on this "bridge").

Given the fact that I have coded Windows device drivers for a lliving in the 
past
(and that I also have a working gentoo linux installation)
I can pretty much test anything you throw at me.

Help?

P.S. I post through hotmail to avoid spam. Should you wish for a safer 
address, here is one:

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