made sure the IP is not in use somewhere else? No outbound firewall blocks?

After some testing it seems the LCDProc package is causing this for me. When I do a webgui reset the display goes to a screen that shows Cli: 0  Scr: 0 with no backlight. I didn't notice it till days after my initial webgui reset. Once I restarted the LCD package the memory leak started again. Reset tonight and Im going to leave the package in the inop state for a few weeks. Running the dev package.

Sorry, I should have said I'm using the NAT method. Restarting the modem has fixed it, so I'm hoping it'll work from now on. Other than that, it was really easy to get this modem running with pfSense  :)

I was able to solve this by removing /var/db/pkg/perl-5.12.4 and then running the install again if anyone encounters this in the future.

The added NIC is a Intel  EXPI9301CTBLK.

let's put it this way. If you remove all the copyrights, you violate the license. If you build a binary and call it pfSense, you violate our trademark. Otherwise, yeah, perhaps you need an attorney.

The FiOS router currently handles NAT, but I am pretty unhappy with it's performance overall. It's prone to crashing and needed hard restarts, its throughput seems pretty poor, and the user interface is a pain. Hence my idea to essentially bridge it so that the pfSense box servers as the DHCP server and is the "first line of defense."

Well, that'd be because the latency between your demarc and gateway is above 20 ms. Not much more to it than that. Keep a ping going for a bit and watch the latency. If you're not seeing spikes in it, then it could be an RRD issue - but I highly doubt it.

errr shared folder watch?

possibly check your firewall rules as well.