In the days of Windows XP, if you sysprep'd a workstation but left the Computer Name blank, the mini-setup process would stop and allow an administrator to supply a name. It killed the notion of Zero Touch Provisioning, but many admins have use cases that require this. For most of those use cases, LANDesk steps in quite nicely and allows a variablized COMPUTERNAME to be inserted on the fly. However, there are still circumstances where machines are provisioned in such an ad-hoc manner that there.

Vista, unfortunately, does not allow for this. If you leave the COMPUTERNAME section blank, or insert an asterisk, Vista will helpfully autogenerate a name for you. It seems like the concept is that naming, along with other workstation customizations can happen once the system is in place as part of the whole Out of Box Experience. Unfortunately, this all happens after the machine has been joined to the domain. So, going this route means you have even more cruft to clean out of your AD.

NameComputer.exe allows you to replace the LANDesk %COMPUTERNAME% variable in unattend.xml after the Vista image has been laid down. You will need to modify your OSD script to download the file locally (just copy what's done before with ldsleep.exe), delete the tokreplw line that injects the COMPUTERNAME from the database and replace it with a REMEXEC line that calls namecomputer.exe. You can continue to use the very same image for ZTP as you use for this process. An additional OSD script is all that's needed.