Good evening,

I notice the Windows 2003 servers from the planet show "Unauthenticated - 32 bit" and from doing some searches on the forums it appears I might not be able to run sharepoint with this version. Can someone advise if this is correct?

Well, Active Directory is highly recommended for SharePoint deployments.
However, I think you can install MS SQL and sharepoint on the same server without AD.
This will allow for one database and one sharepoint deployment; nothing more.
You won't have the ability to load balance across other sharepoint deployments or have the MS SQL database on another server.