It had nothing to do with anything that was installed. It was a FUBAR'd service and registry entry that was causing it. The Dell reps asked what I installed and I navigated to add/remove programs and they were watching my screen. They both said what I installed would not have caused this, but otherwise they had no explanation of why this happened.
I'm failing to see why WAIK or FOG or Clonezilla or anything is even in this conversation. What I NEED in a computer at a school district, Mak, is the ability for ANYBODY to log in, whether it be teacher/custodian/student/principal, and them to pull the information they need. I need every single user of that lab to pull the same printer. The same printer preferences. The same desktop icons. The same power settings. The same program settings. The same configuration with their virus scanner and firewall. I NEED these. Period. Done. Over. I need these.
To achieve these, I need to set up a default profile. I've tried to not lose my temper with this, but to be blunt, Vista flat out sucks with Default Profiles. It's laughable to how it's set up. From that standpoint alone is enough reason to stay with XP until the day the sun burns out and turns into a cold rock.
It's one thing for teachers, because for a teacher computer they all have their own individual settings anyway so it's no big deal. Certain teachers print to different printers, have different desktops, etc. It's THEIR computer, they deal with it accordingly.
But we need uniformity in a lab. Every student (principal, teacher, etc) who uses that lab must be identical.
I'm failing to see why FOG, Clonezilla, or anything else have to do with this. This is a profile thing we're talking about here. Not a cloning solution.
Just keep in mind, businesses and school districts can be very different. I've worked at two school districts and they're both the same. Default profiles are the way to go. Period. With businesses, such as the company I used to work for (largest printing corporation in the United States) didn't use profiles at all, since each user was individualized, therefore rendering a profile useless.
So businesses can use Vista with flying colors and be fine and I wouldn't be surprised. But know this. When I ran into these issues, I emailed all of the neighboring school districts looking for help. They all responded the same way.
Not a single one of them is using Vista. Needless to say, it's difficult for me to get help from others when I'm the "pioneer" in the game. Unfortunately.