Could be a number of things.
I myself dont ever use sysprep. To many side effects.
What I do with machines that are all the same is once I am done installing everything I need on one computer, using just a default account, I then make a drive image with it and then clone the other systems. Once each system is up I go and change the computer name and reboot. Now every system is a perfect clone of each other except for the computer name.
This of course only works when I clone machines that have the same hardware.
Sysprep is suppose to let you do the cloning to other machines that dont have the same hardware. When I have those to do I just make auto install scripts for all the programs and settings and install Windows that way.
But if you never done that before then it can slow you down trying to find out how to do it all.
It is also possible that the clone didnt take right or perhaps there is a bad sector on a drive that is causing the problem on the machine.
Is it happening to all the machines or just one or two?
I'm also concerned that my gpo for folder redirect might be causing problems .....
Redirects dont normally cause that kind of problems, but it does depend what you have redirecting. Such as one of my customers I have 25 workstations and have the my documents folder redirected to a shared folder on the server so their documents follow them. When i tried to have other things such as the outlook profile do the same I had problems. It is because the folder redirect doesnt always work, or the folder isnt always available or for any odd reason.
So if you have something important set in the redirect, such as the entire user profile, including the registry file in the profile then you would have a LOT of hicupps.
Shane