Is 802.1X for real? If so, how do I pull it off?

An anonymous reader writes: I have been asked by management via auditors and regulatory compliance to deploy an 802.1X wired network at my work. This project has been going on for some time and with little success. The biggest problems we have seen is that the native windows supplicant does not work all that well and completely breaks down if you try to RDP in to a machine (which the support desk does all the time). It also has no support for EAP-TTLS/PAP, which we need as our user accounts are stored in Kerberos (MIT's). I have looked at a few other supplicants from Juniper and Cisco, but then stumbled upon XSupplicant from Open1X and read on their email list today that they have released 2.0 for Windows XP. Doing a little bit more reading I found out that this release comes on the heals of the announcement that Aruba Networks and HP Procurve have joined Open1X and the OpenSEA Alliance along with Extreme Networks, Identity Engines, Infoblox, Ja.net, Symantec, TippingPoint, and Trapeze to further secure network authentication via 802.1X. So with all of these vendors backing XSupplicant, does that mean it is pretty solid? I guess my big questions are, who is deploying 802.1X?, what are people's views of 802.1X? and does it really make the edge of my network more secure or are the auditors just up in the night? Thanks