Installing python crashes pfsense

[squee]

I'm trying to install irssi from FreeBSD 8.1.  It pulls in python 2.6 as a dependency.  Somehow that crashes pfsense hard.  Here's my shell session:

[2.0.1-RELEASE][admin@pfSense.localdomain]/root(10): pkg_add -r ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/Latest/irssi.tbz
Fetching ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/Latest/irssi.tbz… Done.
Fetching ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/All/python26-2.6.5.tbz...lib/python2.6/distutils/core.pyc: Can't create 'lib/python2.6/distutils/core.pyc'

I don't have a console readout because the system reboots immediately.  Crashinfo tells me there are no dumps in /var/crash.  I'm using a PIII with 128mb of RAM and 256MB of swap on a 4 gig disk.

I know this isn't strictly supported, but I was hoping to get some ideas on how to track this down.  Thanks.