Another really short bog entry - another pointer to someone elses blog! This is a great little walkthrough re: creating a development vm with DNS and AD and Mail - http://blogs.msdn.com/johnwpowell/archive/2008/07/07/walkthrough-build-a-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-development-virtual-pc-with-sql-server-active-directory-and-e-mail.aspx