I've just found a seemingly more insane (ergo more fun) solution.
I plugged the USB Network Adapter from my Wii into my Vista box and it spat out ASIX AX88772. One google later and it turns out that there is an axe0 driver for this device in FreeBSD.
Thanks for the advice though. And yes, it should boot with GENERIC. Any machine you throw the drive into should boot with GENERIC. Of course, rolling a new kernel is usually one of the first things I do
putting all that stuff in loader.conf is just a nuisance when you know you need it!
Of course, now I'm itching to play with VMware. But first things first. I need to get FreeBSD up!