In your article about Authentication Protocols, you indicated the following:
No NTLM in Win2K native mode
If you convert your Windows 2000 domain?s status to native mode, NTLM support will be disabled
So, without NTLM support also means no network connections from legacy clients (i.e. Win9x, and NT 4.0 clients) are allowed. Are you sure this is not an error on your part?. I thought the PDC Emulator is always there, unless it is removed by the administrator, to provide the backward protocol support namely NTLM for those legacy clients exist on the network.