This does not explicitly answer the question above, however, it did help solve the immediate problem as my setup for selenium would only ever use 1 Firefox instance and not try to load them on the fly.
With that said, this would help the majority of users out there, thus the reason I'm putting it as an "Answer" here, but not selecting it as the correct one.
I found the answer here at phpunit-selenium issue queue on github. Thanks emaks.
Simply load your selenium server with the command line option
-Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=PROFILE_NAME
Note: PROFILE_NAME is the machine name located in your profiles.ini in the Firefox Application Data directory. It is not a path or what not.