Follow up to "No authority could be contacted for authentication"

Anthony Moore, an IT Manager at LivePoint, provided me with some more understanding of the root causes of yesterday's demo machine errors.

Each machine in a domain has a password, (exactly like your username / password) and the passwords are reset periodically as well automatically though Active Directory...

If you restore an image of a machine to a prior state, the password in active directory becomes out of sync with [what] is stored in the machine, and the...issue can occur.

I imagine this isn't news to any Active Directory gurus out there but it clears things up for me. Going forward I will be including the AD Domain Controller in the server snapshots and rolling it back alongside the SharePoint virtual machines.

Hope this helps someone else. Thanks for the insight, Anthony!