There were two “A” record entries in DNS which resolve the server to two different host names:
<servername>.<yourdomain>.com
<servername>.pdp.<yourdomain>.init.com
The first second entry was the actual FQDN of the server. The first one was an alias. Therefore the installation process was first given “<servername>.<yourdomain>.com” as the FQDN to which to attempt to call the NSConfigurationWebService.asmx page. This caused the server to construct an authentication token as if it was attempting to access another server and not its self.
A test was performed to see if this condition existed by opening IE (while logged on as the SMP service account) and attempted to access the page using the two different FQDN records
http://<servername>.<yourdomain>.com/Altiris/NS/Services/NSConfigurationWebService.asmx {The result was being challenged to authenticate. Even if given the proper credentials it did not give access to the page}
http://<servername>.pdp.<yourdomain>.init.com/Altiris/NS/Services/NSConfigurationWebService.asmx {Access to the configuration portal was immediately granted}