HELP! - Restoring a machine from a non Time Machine FW drive?

In all previous incarnations of OS X I have routinely imaged a roomful of machines by having a good image in a FW drive and using Disk Utility (and CCC before it) to restore the bootable image onto a new machine fresh out the box.
I've just tried this with our lab full of new 10.5.8 machines (details in sig) onyl to find that when I reboot the machines following a succesful restore I see the desktop but no dock, drive icon or menu bar.
I KNOW this must meanthat parts of OS X admin have changed & that I've not kept up but I wonder if anyone would be so kind as to help me out with the way I should be achieving this task these days...
Many thanks in advance,
N

A little more info on the problem:-
Once the machines boot I can see the (custom) desktop image but no other UI components. Clicking where those components should be produces no response.
Keyboard shortcut for Force Quit has no effect.
Keyboard shortcut for log out produces the dialog box but clicking log out has no effect.
Hard restarting and PRAM zap changes nothing.
I'm now pretty much stumped. This always worked in the past.
In my head I'm wondering if an IP conflict could be blocking the full boot of the GUI (as I'm imaging from a single machine the IP will conflict until I can get in and manually change it).
Any help (very) gratefully received,
N
null
edited for clarity by me.

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