OK - I realize this might be old hat for some of you Windows SharePoint Services pros out there, but I have found a tip that you all might be interested in. BTW, many thanks to the guys at ITT Industries in Colorado Springs for this bit of good news.
Anyways, he has a way of creating multiple top-level sites inside a single sight collection in a single VS using a single database that maps to the URL naming convention of sight.domain.com.
In the host header of his site, he inputed domain.com. Then he created a root team site at domain.com, so when you go to domain.com, his team site appears.
Now, using the sts command line, he creates new top level sites using the site name that he was to prepend to domain.com. For example, if he wants an URL hr.domain.com, he creates a new top-level site called HR. He is able to perform this using the command line, but it doesn't work in the UI. And no managed path is needed either.
I'm sure you WSS gurus are laughing at this point, but for a SharePoint Portal Server guy like me, I enjoyed learning this new tip.