I must admit this does sound familiar.
I once tried to load fireplay on my Wii, which caused 1. the wii to hang (out of memory? nearly 20k songs) and 2. the server to crash.
I also recall this happened before when I was fed up waiting for fireplay to reload, so I just closed the browser, which also resulted in a locked up server.
I guess fireplay just doesnt have any “timeout” code once triggered.
Maybe a simple solution, change the port it runs on?
A port which is not blocked by your firewall, that is.