Further update...
It appears the scope of this problem may be somewhat greater than I thought. After talking with my IT associate here in the office, it turns out that since our fairly recent upgrade to 12.1.6608.6300 pushes to new Windows 7 clients from the Client Deployment Wizard have stopped working as well. I tested this by attempting a push to a fresh Windows 7 Enterprise client and received the same failure as described above.
In doing the Windows 7 test I noted one more detail – Everytime the push is attempted from SEPM, an entry is created in the client’s Security Event Log indicating an audit failure. The details are;
Logon Account: NT Authority\Network Service
Source Workstation: vBobcat (name of SEPM server)
Error Code: 0xc0000064
This happens despite the fact that the authentication credentials entered into the Deployment Wizard just before the start of the push are accepted.
I did log a ticket with tech support. They have asked me to attempt a push using the alternate tool, “ClientRemote.exe” which I have not yet attempted.
At this point, clients that had been at the prior version (12.1.6168.6000) have updated to 12.1.6608.6300 by virtue of our having assigned the new package to the various client groups in SEPM. However, as described above, attempts to push the same package to a new client invariably fail.
Dale M.