Hi Brad,
It is cool to read how you've taken KID and are extending it.
Yes, you are right. KID 1.1 is designed so that the repositories have the most up to date version of initrd. This is built upon the Kaseya scripting support for updating Windows exes with older version numbers. So initrd is wrapped in a exe (which is our own code, it isn't a self extracting zip) just so it can be versioned. Unfortunately that means the local initrd is overwritten with each operation.
What I do when testing initrd, is change the initrd filename in grubop.cfg and grubmenu.cfg files (e.g. to initrd.new) on the VSA server to use a different file when a client computer PXE boots. Then I copy my new initrd to that filename in the tftp directory on the repository. (Let me know if you want me to post example grub cfg files, and I will do that when I am back in the office.)
A drawback of this method is it only works for PXE boot, not the DiskBoot option that KID 1.1 has. DiskBoot is used if a computer fails to PXE boot and uses a local copy of grub.cfg and initrd on the client computer which are installed by another Windows exe called EnterPreos.exe.
If you can find a way of changing Windows resources in an exe file without having to rebuild them that would be another option. Then you could modify initrd.exe and EnterPreos.exe. Unfortunately I don't of any way to do this.
Alternatively you might not need to inject your own drivers during the cloning. You might be able to preinstall them on you master computer before taking an image of it. Or if you can't install them then, they may be able to be installed as part of SysPrep. (I'm not a SysPrep expert, but I know it does have options for that.)
Hopefully that is some help. Good luck with your experiments, and please let me know if you have any more questions about KID.
Cheers,
David.