@cmb:
You shouldn't be seeing this anymore. It used to happen under certain circumstances, but nobody has reported it in any 1.2 versions. It's not an issue of the file system, the file system fsck's at boot if it wasn't properly unmounted and will recover itself just fine.
Could you boot the system off the live CD next time this happens, fsck and mount the file system, and scp the broken config.xml off the box, then send it to me? If you'll do that, I'll provide more detailed info on what needs to be done.
In a linux box I really could do that without problem; I'm new in bsd systems and am trying to know the system commands that are similar in linux in order to try to fix when something bad happens; to tell you the truth, I really didnt remembered that I could mount the filesystem using a live CD and fsck it; In the last time it happened, I reinstalled the system using one earlyer version (1.2rc2) and changed my UPS (the last one wasnt working properly, breaking the energy supply for the pf box) and hope, it will never (at least for ups reasons) will happen again; but if it does, then I may try to copy some config.xml for you!
I'm trying to read a little about bsd, in the future it will be easyer to me to help you with this!
thanks again!
srs