During a VMware View deployment I ran into this one because we chose to create a number of computer accounts beforehand. The answer from jwalsh in the VMware forums described the issue and the solution perfectly:
I’ve seen something very similar. The workaround was to use “username@domain” as the user in the customization specification.
The first time the join is done, it is done just with the username, if this fails then username@domain is used. It may be that the first failed attempt is locking the account in AD.
See the entire topic here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1149793
Documenting a virtualization project 