I'm blogging this for future reference...
We have several new laptops at work going out to our people in the field. Since we're doing quite a few of these, we got our ASP.NET app running on one system and then we're ghosting it for deployment to others.
Using a brand new Norton SystemWorks Pro 2004 (with Ghost) I attempted to ghost the machine and it returned a generic “36000” error. I checked their website and they said “defrag the drive”. I thought to myself - you've got to be kidding, right? The article explained the problems with extreme fragmentation under NTFS so I figured I had nothing to lose. On the other hand, we're talking about a brand new IBM ThinkPad. After the defrag completed, Ghost ran smoothly.
I was really surprised that (1) fragmentation would cause a problem and (2) the ThinkPad was heavily fragmented out of the box. I do have to say I was impressed with Symantec's online support.