Thank you for all the hard work you have done, Nathan.

I had couple of issuses with the vpc image, possibly because I'm a newbie in vpc and linux:
1) My mouse didn't work out of the box, virtual machine just couldn't capture it (MX518). I googled, and found this solution:
----------------
In /boot/grub/menu.lst
Replacing:
kernel …… splash
with:
kernel …… i8042.noloop
-------------------

And mouse works after that.

2) VPC image didn't have a network card setup. I had to go to preferences, and select vpc's network card as a first nic. Maybe it was like that by design, or something else... I used RC version available in here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

Didn't have time to test anything else, yet.