Hi dolemite, believe it or not I have been wanting to post a reply to your post for a couple of days now.

Ok, plip0 is one of those BSD Unix features that Linux does not really have anymore. It is a parallel port communication device. In other words you could connect a series of BSD boxen together via parallel cables and they could talk to each other over the plip interface. There is also slip which is a similar device but runs over serial.

More in line with your question is your install problems. Follow the advice of the postings that you found. If that fails, consider getting the 4.3 release iso and installing that. FreeBSD has one incredibly powerfull tool called `cvsup' that will allow you to rebuild the entire system to the latest stable snapshot. http://www.freebsddiary.org and http://www.bsdvault.net have good instructions for doing this. Once built to that latest stable whenever you install a package from /stand/sysinstall or the ports collection, it will be the latest approved package for FreeBSD.

Anyway, I hope this helped, and if you have any other questions be sure and ask. FreeBSD rocks and I am sure you will like it. Very steep learning curve, even makes Slackware look user firendly, but it is worth the trouble.