I'm confused why you'd want to be using Ghost 2003 for this; it's a consumer product which was licensed for use with a single machine, and using it for deployment to multiple machines isn't what it was sold for. The corporate versions of Ghost (Ghost Enterprise 8.0 came out just after after Ghost 2003, which was based on corporate Ghost 7.5) not only is more flexible and includes network distribution tools, it's also always been far cheaper per licensed machine than the consumer product was.

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My intuition is that you're right; we've seen a few cases of this kind of thing caused by dodgy DOS network drivers, even recently using the BIOS network drivers used to PXE boot in some models.

If that's the case though, you don't really have a lot of options for fixing it except to move to a different operating system for doing the deployment, so you can get a different driver (and mapped network drive client), like Windows PE or a Linux distribution (current corporate Ghost in GSS2.5 supports using either).

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For PXE boot deployment generally you can use any machine you want to serve up the boot package, provided that you configure your network appropriately so that the client machines can discover the PXE server exists (via a relay agent in their subnets, or by configuring the DHCP options offered to them, or another method along those lines).

For RIS specifically, there is various documentation discussing situations like this that arise from having the PXE server separate from the main AD server (which in Microsoft's preferred configuration normally runs your DHCP and DNS as well). See for instance this article on PXE separate from DHCP and also this article which discusses some other related mechanics in the interaction between DHCP and RIS and PXE.