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I've finally setup my own virtual PC lab in VirtualBox. I'm using 2008 R2 to create an Active Directory, have a WinXP client, and pipe them both through pfSense. It only took 2 days to install and update 2008 R2 with most of the second day spent fiddling with VirtualBox's quirks when trying to get the XP client working from an existing vdi.

Things that went wrong:

• Didn't use a 2008R2 SP1 install cd/slipstream with SP1/Use 2012's eval
• Skipped installing the DNS role because the router will take care of it (wrong)
• Moved XP vdi into a virtualmachine folder before VirtualBox created the machine, thus resulting in it saying the machine already existed when it didn't (no configuration files whatsoever).
• Renamed the XP vdi after selecting it, but before creating the machine, resulting in VirtualBox opening 4-5 "Select disk image" dialogs with all of them non-responsive. Had to force quit it and rename the machine's folder half a dozen times.
• Set secondary DNS server on client and server. Forwarders were already setup on the server, so all I had to do was point the client's DNS settings to the server and the server's DNS settings to loopback with desired DNS servers (Google, OpenDNS, pfSense, my router) set as Forwarders in the DNS role.
• Still having problems resolving. I have to ping or attempt to connect to sites twice before they'll work.
• Having the wrong DNS settings on the client will result in it hanging at Retrieving/Applying personal settings. The machine will respond, but since it isn't logged in yet, you can't do much anything.

But, I now have a working domain that I can finally install Outlook and Exchange on. I could install Outlook before, but the interview is probably going to contain how to set it up and I'm not going to fork over my login credentials to a trial email client whose downloading process is needlessly long and, well, read my previous post.
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I woke my desktop from sleep half an hour ago and the following occurred:

• Firefox was frozen, but not "not responding" or whiting out
• I could not open new explorer windows.
• Then I saw the network connection icon was displaying a yellow exclamation sign
• Unplugging the Ethernet cable didn't change the icon to a red x.
• I could move between and interact with windows, but not navigate into or out of currently open folders
• Start Menu would open and highlight what the mouse hovered over
• TaskManager opened as a blank window with menu items, but could not be closed or moved
• I could open run dialogs, but shutdown -r -t 0 didn't even execute.

So, I hit the reset button and watched as it "resumed windows". It's done this before. It's like it does not completely load from hybrid sleep and enters the above quasi-functional state. This hasn't happened for a long time and I'm starting to think it isn't a coincidence it stopped when I moved the page file onto my other drives and only started again when I put a small page file back onto my OS drive.

*As for why I put one back. It turns out using one drive for documents, music, page files, AND Photoshop Temp files and using them all at once is a really bad idea, especially on a 5400 rpm drive. It's like Windows refused to acknowledge I had a second page file on a faster drive and my machine would occasionally lock up while the slower harddrive made heavy access sounds..*

Once I got to the login screen, it said I was still logged in, so, as previous experience dictated, I waited for all the harddrive grinding to stop before logging in. Once I tried, the screen went black before I could click my name, my monitor lost signal, then the bios showed up. A complete restart. Again.

Apparently, all the commands I issued before pressing the reset button were still queued up when it restored from the hibernation file...which doesn't make sense to me.