A few years back, we used Acronis as our imaging software solution. Right from the get-go, it worked terrible. It never worked right. I'd image a whole lab of 40 PCs and half way through the image, something would hiccup and most of the PCs would reboot and all the PCs that rebooted would be defective and I'd have to image them again. Sometimes it took me 3-5 times of an image before it was successful. Acronis' tech support was terrible and unhelpful. After years of getting no where with what was causing the issue, I gave up on the software and started using Clonezilla with a usb stick and a usb hard drive to reload PCs.
But before with Acronis, there were two things I look at that I wonder if it was what was causing the issues...
The acronis server ran on a virtual machine that shared the phsyical machine and NIC with 3 other VMs.
The images were stored on a USB drive and/or a NAS.
I'm implementing a new Ghost "server" that's actually running on a Windows 7 stand-alone box. This new PC has a gig NIC and it's plugged directly into a gig switchport on the backbone of the MDF. Lately I've been trying to make our network as simple as possible to make it less error prone. I've been trying to keep as many servers off the domain as possible if it's not needed they are on the domain. Is it required the Ghost server is on the domain? If it's not on the domain, will it still be able to add the imaged PCs to the domain after it's done imaging? I don't know if it's necessary, but a few new servers that it isn't necessary I've left off the domain and so far they seem to be less error prone. Trying to use the KISS (Keep it simple stupid) philosophy to my network now.