Gang,
We have two nearly-identical studies using two different populations of interest, and one of them is in more of a time crunch than I'd realized, so objective c) is that I need a solution I can hack together and run in a few days to a week, at least for one of the two studies. Since I don't have any experience with surface analyses other than playing with FreeSurfer a little, I don't think that's an option for that study. For the other study, though, it might be a good solution. Does surface registration do a much better job of aligning functionally isomorphic regions than volume registration does? We also have some deep structure seeds, but these might be much more well-behaved across subjects.
Isaac