>I noticed there was a new BIOS available to accomodate w2k on the 
>Sony web site, and tried it with my Sony Vaio N505VE.  My machine
>still crashes with netbsd-current if I have pnpbios turned on.
>
>Just thought others might want to know.

My (Stanford's) PCG-350 wedges if I turn PnPbios on.

On my machine, the cause appears to be the IR port. Without PnPbios,
it gets detected as what the BIOS calls COM3, and is left alone when
tty flags get set.

With PnPbios on, the IR port gets re-mapped as COM2, and when
ttyflags get set, it gets hit, possibly using the wrong IRQ. 

You could try commenting out the pnpbios attachments for serial ports,
and see if that works better.  (This was with a 1.4P kernel, your
mileage may vary).