good bye LTSP :-/

I came to my current employer with the hope to try out some cool new software: the Linux Terminal Server project. In theory, with good enough equipment you should be able to deploy office grade desktops from one LTSP server.
Jump ahead 3 years. We've made great progress from the original Gentoo box running LTSP 4.1. We now have sound, local device support, and even accelerated video drivers! My thanks to Cyberorg and KIWI-LTSP project for making much of the new features available.

But alas, it just doesn't work good enough. Some issues
1) Multi-user file access isn't good enough. Novell client doesn't work, samba mount doesn't work, pam_mount, etc all either lock the server, don't display permissions correctly, or can't automount on login. We've looked at every alternative, but this issue cannot seem to be fixed.
2) Video failures. Nvidia, intel, closed source, open source drivers. doesn't matter. With nvidia, certain apps will cause the machine to hard-lock. We've tried better video cards, which seemed to fix some of the issues, but I don't think putting gaming cards in business machines is the end all fix
3) Thunderbird. Specifically, Lightning. It seems that the rendering of the calendar is display intensive, and on LTSP machines it can take upto 30 seconds to render a Month view. For some people with many calendar entries, thunderbird will become unresponsive. This is unacceptable. And was the last straw. If users can't do calendaring on their workstation, then the workstation is useless.

So what now? Using the strengths of the kiwi imaging system, I think it will be possible to deploy disk images to clients. It should only cost $20-$50 to retrofit each machine with a ~20GB hdd and 2gb of ram.
To update machines, we're planning to just deploy new images as needed.

I'm working on SLE11 right now, this should be our basis for new clients.

Any suggestions? fixes for my three issues above? I'd love to hear them.