I'm able to deploy a Vista client, a WS08 server, but not XP or WS03.  I'm probably just doing something stupid, or missing something, so that's why I'm posting this begging for sympathy.

1. When deploying Vista, I edit the Task, click on the button to edit the Unattend.xml contents.  I specify the time zone (e.g. 035) and some other settings, but the deployment seems to completely ignore that.  Is there a step in the workbench editor to make it look to the unattend.xml for settings?  An example of this is during the client installation using the LiteTouch PE bootstrap, it prompts me to specify the time zone, defaulting to PST, but I set EST in the unattend.xml.  If I leave that alone and continue on, it indeed sets PST as the default.

2. When deploying XP, it fails to contact the MD server.  I enter the credentials as when deploying Vista or WS08, but it returns an error that it can't contact the deployment share/server for authentication.  I get the same thing trying to deploy an image of WS03-STD-SP2.

I'm using Vmware Workstation 6 (latest patch) with all my VM's set for bridged networking.  Running on a Vista x64 laptop with 4GB RAM.  Everything else (afa VMware WS6 goes) seems to work fine, so I'm assuming it's not VMware causing the issue with XP.

This might be part of the problem, but not all of the problem (as far as I can tell): http://support.microsoft.com/?id=931760

I guess I'll have a public conversation with myself on this, but anyhow, what I've learned is that the problem with deploying XP and 2003 appears to be caused by VMware Workstation 6.  I have the latest build installed, so it's not an issue of being behind on updates.  What happens is that if I create a new VM and specify XP Professional as the template, instead of Vista, it fails on the authentication step during the LTI boot up (WinPE 2.0).  It's not a failure during the installation, since I don't even get to the point where I select which OS image to install.  If I create the VM using Vista as the template, I get to the LTI boot just fine and can select XP image from the list to install.  Now however, it still fails to refer to the unattend.txt which I edited in MD workbench.  I don't see where the unattend.txt or sysprep.inf (for XP) or unattend.xml (for Vista) are ever referred to during the actual LTI boot/install process.  No matter what I stuff in those files, they are totally ignored for some reason.  Maybe I'm missing something obvious?  I suppose I'll end up answering this myself. :)