Why is STP turned off?

[John Haxby <john.haxby@oracle.com>]

I've been having trouble with bridges and I noticed that STP is 
explicitly turned off.  This in spite of the brctl man page:

       brctl stp <bridge> <state> controls this bridge  instance’s  
participa-
       tion in the spanning tree protocol. If <state> is "on" or "yes" 
the STP
       will be turned on, otherwise it will be turned off.  When  
turned  off,
       the  bridge  will not send or receive BPDUs, and will thus not 
partici-
       pate in the spanning tree protocol.  If  your  bridge  isn’t  
the  only
       bridge  on the LAN, or if there are loops in the LAN’s topology, 
DO NOT
       turn this option off. If you turn this option off, please know 
what you
       are doing.

So, I guess someone knew what they were doing

Why did you turn STP off?

jch