In my eagerness, I set up a Windows 2008 R2 64 bit virtual image (on VMWare) to install my SharePoint 2010 Server development environment. It turns out that SharePoint 2010 beta is incompatible with Windows 2008 R2 fresh install [1]. It will cause some services to not startup and work.
***Update***
Microsoft has released a patch for Windows 2008 R2 to allow SharePoint 2010 to work on Windows 2008 R2[2]
[2] http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=166231