MaCHD

R2 versus plain old W2K8? As far as domain controllers go, you would gain the Active Directory recycle bin, native PowerShell cmdlets for Active Directory (native as opposed to the ones by 3rd party Quest) and some other things that may not justify a rebuild - or the expense of acquiring brand new 64 bit hardware (see below). If you've been managing AD on W2K3 without PS all this time, I rather doubt using it now is crucial. Second, do you know if the servers you want to upgrade are in fact 64 bit compatible? Some members have mentioned how they've got W2K8 to run on servers that are quite old. Some older servers may not be able to run a 64 bit OS to start with.

I think you'll need to find and boot from the Installation disk, which will allow you to use the "repair" option. That may fix the problem. I see the problem has occurred (Google) for others, but after boot, so you don't have options suggested elsewhere (run 3rd party mem test, etc.).

I second the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Version 3.5 (not even the latest) just worked perfectly with a brand new Lenovo. It has yet to fail me.

MaXiM, What version of Exchange are you running? Mixed 2007/2010 environment? But you have a single Exchange server, right? So it has to be one or the other.

We are not using Deep Freeze with our Windows 7 Pro client machines and have not encountered any notable problems for the six months that we have done so. We use a GPO to erase the user profile after so many days. This has the same effect Deep Freeze does, at the user profile level, but would not protect the client in the same way anywhere else in the file structure (in C:\windows for example). Besides making sure students and teachers are not admins, we configure the same GPO to automatically reject UAC elevation (so the prompt never even appears). Only downside: the CONTENT of the user profiles is deleted but not the top level folder. So we have a multiplication of folders like this: User1 User1.001 User1.002 User1.003 etc. Logon time seems to take longer on Windows 7 than on XP when the user profile needs to be created afresh too. EDIT - unfortunately, I do not believe the erase profile settings exists for XP (and obviously not the UAC one).