What are the pixel values in those very bright areas? It looks like they’re probably very high and the filter isn’t able to cope.
That would explain why the 8-bit is fine, because the 8-bit pixel values are probably clamped before filtering.
You could try using different filters, perhaps a softening filter like gaussian with a wider filter radius. Of course that’ll end up over-softening your image which you probably don’t want either.
Of course the real problem is more subtle. You’ve created a scene that would be impossible to photograph with a camera or view with the human eye. In order to stop the bright areas over-exposing the whole image, a photographer would have to close the aperture on his camera so much that the room inside would become very dark.
Tone mapping is the obvious solution as this mirrors what you do in real life, but if mental ray maps the tones after it does the filtering, you’re still stuck with the same problem. In that case, you’ll just have to go back and relight the image to balance it out a bit better.