Greetings!

[Jonathan D. Proulx]

$DIETY bless you!

That's quite an impressive setup you have ther,e based on no previous
experience you say!

Why are you using StarOffice instead of OpenOffice.org (aka OOo) which is to
StarOffice as Mozilla is to Netscape?  OOo is free software and part
of the base edubuntu install.

I have no experience with Ghost, what we (MIT CompSci and Artificial
Intelligence Lab) use to manage our Debian install base is "FAI"
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/.  It's almost certainly more
complicated to set up but is likely within your powers given how far
you've gotten.  After systems are installed we use cfengine
http://www.cfengine.org/ to keep configurations syncronized and to
push patches.  I know cfengine is an available package, I'm not sure
about FAI...it's not a "friendly" pair of tool I must admit.

If you don't get an answer from soemone with direct experience about
authenticating against a Windows domain, I have the facilities to test
this and will try and make the time as it sounds like a common problem
with getting Linux into schools.  Here we do the opposite windows
domain clients authenticate against our Linux based Kerberos realm.

-Jon