xSTP is family of protocols which is intended to detect loops in L2 network and break those loops by disabling some of links (and enable them back if loop breaks at some other point). Wikipedia as usual has a
nice article about it.
Now, loop detection relies on certain behaviour of connected devices and if some of them misbehave in "suitable" way, loop can be mis-detected. Depending on the topology of your netweork this is likely to be happening ... specially so if disabling xSTP doesn't cause some traffic loops (which are usually quite notable).