Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide

Few Third-Party Software Applications

Mainly, you are going to encounter problems with software that is designed to display widgets in the system tray, like some antivirus and shell modification applications. You may also encounter some problems with management software, although typically these types of applications work in the background and don't display anything graphically. For example, agents from the SMS 2005 and MOM 2005 family of management products should work fine on Server Core boxes, as their operations are largely under the surface and not presented to the user in a graphical fashion.

Lastly, driver installation will be a sore point in a few instances, and you'll need to either use hardware with drivers bundled with the Server Core release or preload the appropriate drivers with the included Drvload utility. You might face driver signing issues as well, though these can be mitigated by actually touching the driver-signing policy on the Server Core machine through Group Policy—but of course, you have to do that remotely.