There is no way to physically remove it as it is a chipset on the motherboard.  Use the Downloads tab above and make sure you have the latest chipset and patches drivers.

I encountered a problem before, when i was using the firewire for a long period of time... it got a bang in device manager and it would't go away with rebooting... I found out it was the conflicting with my new USB mouse (weird)...  this only happened once, but i thought it might be worth mentioning.