There is an issue when starting up a set of nodes in a cluster where the coordinator has told the surviving members that state transfer has been disabled. 

If rebalancing is disabled while the cluster is running it's disabled on all the nodes. However, if a new set of nodes join afterwards, they don't know that rebalancing was disabled.

This has consequences if there is a new coordinator elected (like during a MERGE) from the set of newly-started nodes.
To prevent this and ensure the greatest probability of success, a node joining should get the state of this flag from the response from the coordinator.