"The comment about registering the server as "Local" to ensure portability tweaks my interest. I'm wondering how you register a named instance as "Local"..."

By default a named instance can be referred to as " (local) ", if only one named instance of SQL Server exists on the box.

As for the author, it seems like this is a work-around for not clicking directly on the package name when choosing the child package.  Maybe he didn't know you could do that?

On a similar note...

By default the "DTSRUNUI" generates something like:

DTSRun /S "(local)" /N "zTEST-DTSRun" /G "{32E787CD-4764-4D7A-820C-43888AE1F87C}" /A "Body":"8"="TestBody" /A "Subject":"8"="TESTSubject" /W "0" /E

This has both Name and PackageID specified.  Name is portable, but PackageID is not.  Removing PackageID from the command string fixes this problem, and does not affect the exection of the package.