Bridge setup at boot

[Da Rock]

I feel like a real newbie asking this one, but the answer is still
eluding me :(

I have a system where I'm separating my servers for distinction so I'm
running qemu.

I have a bridge setup which works occasionally, but I need it to work
100% of the time. I also need this to run at boot time, which is where
it seems to fall short (not to mention that on occasion even the re
driver fails to load- not sure if its hardware or software yet, but
appears to have no bearing on the bridge problem; I could still get an
ip address via dhcp when the bridge is not working).

My loader.conf looks like this:

snd_hda_load=YES
if_bridge_load=YES
if_tap_load=YES

My rc.conf looks like this:

cloned_interfaces="bridge0 tap0"
autobridge_interface="bridge0"
autbridge_bridge0="re0 tap0"
ifconfig_re0="up"
ifconfig_tap0="up"
ifconfig_bridge0="DHCP"

If I tell re0 to use DHCP as well, I can access the host, but not the
guest. If I run qemu in a script, the guest cannot get a DHCP address.

This seems to happen intermittently- one problem then the other. If the
bridge fails to get an ip from dhcp, I find re going down just after
bridge0 starts looking for an ip- re comes up again after that starts.
If bridge0 does get an ip, the tap0 will go down and qemu guest can't
get an ip.

I feel like I'm going round in circles now. Using rc.conf nothing
appears to be happening in order- things seem to be going up and down
when they feel like instead of when they should. I need this to be
stable, not a "cross your fingers and toes, we're going in" scenario-
which is what bridging appears to be like at startup. Manually I can get
it working off the bat, but I'm trying to get this working within the
framework provided.

For reference the sysctl.conf settings mentioned in some circles are
useless in 7.1- net.link.ether.bridge_cfg and
net.link.ether.bridge.enable aren't recognized.

Any help?