This is the correct answer for moving the TEMP directory to another drive, so thank you for that. the machine i'm running the converter on is vista so i thought i had done this not realizing the setting was not a computer setting, but rather a user setting. Not sure what the computer TEMP setting does, but changing it on the user worked for getting VMWare converter to use the D Drive. This will definitely help once i figure out why my OVA files are failing.

To answer your question of why i chose OVA files, for some reason, it was the only thing that i could get to work. Every other format i used to pull the servers down from my ESXI 4 beta server would fail. Unfortunately, i needed the same machine to move off the Beta server, so i had do to an in place upgrade. It's a lab so it's not an elegant setup. VMMachines stored on the ESXI server (as opposed to on network).