Robtate2 -
Thanks for sharing your experience.
We recently upgraded vCenter to 5.5 and all of my issues stated were fixed except the customization of a 2012 R2 machine... the same symptoms exist. We plan on going to 6.x eventually. I am hoping when we get to that level [and we get all of our hosts on the same version] that I can try upgrading the hardware version of the template to either v10 or v11 and see if that helps.
With you being on 5.5, can you tell me what hardware version your template is on? Even though we are on vCenter 5.5 all of our hosts are still on 5.1 U3 so I can't upgrade past hardware v9