I was running sccm 2007 r2 sp1, but since this error, i upgraded to sccm 2007 r2 sp2 this morning when I got in to work. the waik is the latest one they have on microsofts site for windows 7 and server 2008 (not sure where to find the version number for it). since I upgraded sccm, the boot.wim's created successfully.
Thank you for your response and thanks for this forum. Alot of great info here....
john