I didn't have a camera handy, and I've reverted back to SP2 for the moment, but here are a few more details:

During the windows install, after it's installed all the system devices, I hang up at "Installing network components". The blue progress bar gets to about 30% then it will hang there forever. I let it run overnight just to be sure. My normal XPsp2 install cd works fine, and that's the one I used as a source with nlite.

I tried another slipstream version this morning with the same results. That's odd, considering the very first time I tried this as a test on my test laptop everything worked great.

A few other notes:
-my first test showed the modern XP install screens, not the classic. No matter which option I chose last night and today I'm getting the classic install prompts.
-possibly related? My blown onboard LAN started working after a fresh install, but when I installed SP3, it went dead again. Maybe SP3 has an issue with this particular lan?

Thanks for the response and I look forward to browsing your forum daily!

-V