It's almost certainly the case that the cause is that the OS hasn't finished loading all the necessary services; the exact order in which things become available tends to subtly change in each edition of Windows, particularly as Microsoft reorganize things to make the perceived boot times faster by letting more and more services come up after the parts of the OS needed to service interactive use.

So, in Vista PE it could take quite a long time before all the network interfaces became available because the OS would still be detecting and installing network drivers at the time startnet.cmd was running, and in the case of 19914 it means that almost none of the fundamental machinery for TCP/IP networking is available in the OS when Ghost is starting.

It may help to ensure that you are using "WPEUTIL InitializeNetwork" to ensure that all the necessary services have started.

Great, thanks for that.

Is "WPEUTIL InitializeNetwork" a command I can just add to startnet.cmd, prior to calling ghost32.exe?

Cheers

I agree with Nigel on the diagnosis of the issue, but I usually resolve this by adding ipconfig/renew just before the calling Ghost32.exe and the switches. It's a simple command, it adds a little time to the process to deal with network latency and tries to pull a new DHCP address. I'm sure the WPEUTIL InitializeNetwork would work just fine, though.