[ ross- this is pretty clearly in my court ]

This is what I was worried about- Jason insisted on us downloading f/w
by default and I wanted to default to not doing so- it looks like there's
something about 4.65 (same feature set as 7.65, but no target mode and
fixes bugs that show up with 7.64 under other alphas! :-)) that seems to
be borking this XP1000.

How are you booting this machine at all? Is this the install kernel?
Can you boot another kernel and try a few test kernels for me?

-matt