We are using Symantec ghost 8.0 for ghosting and multicasting, we have images saved on our server.  for the first time we used multicast on our network. we are using a floppy to boot up to it.  We have 14 IBm t-61 laptops that came in and we ar using the same image for all of them.  the session was started on a desktop in our IT room and all the laptops are in our server room.  The image is on our server so it goes from the server to the desktop to the laptops, the issue we see is that it is really slow it ranged from 25mb to now 13mb and it is has been running since yesterday morning and it has 4 hours left so it is slow.  What i heard though with multicasting is some kind of switch needs to be added or the broadcast address needs to be changed.  I need some help with speeding this up.  I really dont know for sure thats why I am on this site.   :)

The basic principles of GhostCast over IP multicast (which has been a standard part of TCP/IP for almost 20 years now) is described here.

There can be any number of causes for multicast performance problems or failure; the most common one, far and away above all others, is networks that are misconfigured. If multicast fails outright the cause is usually a misconfigured switch or router - poor performance is usually caused by unmanaged switches (which treat multicast as broadcast) or managed switches without IGMP snooping enabled (which again causes the switch to treat multicast as broadcast) mixed in with ancient Half-duplex or 10-megabit gear which causes collision problems for the network segment where the problem equipment is.

However, for this kind of poor performance in older editions of Ghost like 8.0 another common cause is a problem in the endpoints themselves; this is especially a problem with never machines which are not designed to be compatible with DOS drivers, and which place the hard disk and network driver interrupt lines together. To see if this is affecting the T61, try adding -noide to Ghost to force it to use the system BIOS to access the hard disk instead of using its own built-in disk drivers (which require the IRQ line to not be shared with the network device).