FAI disk config problem

[RU Admin]

I'm running Debian Wheezy with FAI 4.0.3 and for my disk_config I'm using 
the following:

disk_config disk1 disklabel:msdos fstabkey:uuid bootable:1
primary  /            20G      ext4  rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro tuneopts="-c 0 -i 0"
logical  /var         10G      ext4  rw,noatime                   createopts="-L var -m 5"     tuneopts="-c 0 -i 0"
logical  swap         8G       swap  sw
logical  /tmp         20G      ext4  rw,noatime                   createopts="-L tmp -m 0"     tuneopts="-c 0 -i 0"
logical  /home        1G       ext4  rw,noatime,nosuid            createopts="-L home -m 1"    tuneopts="-c 0 -i 0"
logical  /backup      10G-     ext4  rw,noatime                   createopts="-L backup"        tuneopts="-c 0 -i 0"

My problem is that after I do the FAI install on the machine, and look at 
the partition table with fdisk, I see:

/dev/sda1   *        2048    41945087    20971520   83  Linux
/dev/sda2        41945088  1952448511   955251712    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        41945090    62916609    10485760   83  Linux
/dev/sda6        62916612    79693827     8388608   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7        79693830   121636869    20971520   83  Linux
/dev/sda8       121636872   123734023     1048576   83  Linux
/dev/sda9       123734026  1952448511   914357243   83  Linux

Why is the first partition starting at 2048 instead of 1?  If I look at 
the disk in cfdisk, it's showing 1.05MB of free space at the beginning of 
the disk...although it's a trivial amount of space being lost, why am I 
losing it?

I have a Debian Squeeze system running FAI 3.4.7 and I don't see that 
problem when using the same disk config.

Any help would be much appreciated, the main reason I'm looking into this 
is because I'm trying to use the preserve_always option with FAI 4.0.3 
after I've already done an initial install on the system with the same 
FAI disk_config and I'm getting:

Previous partitions overflow begin of preserved partition /dev/sda8
Prototype mismatch: sub Parse::RecDescent::namespace000001::dclone ($) vs none at /usr/share/perl5/Parse/RecDescent. pm line 1984 during global destruction.

I was hoping it had something to do with the 1.05MB of wasted space in the 
beginning of the disk causing problems.  Again, using the same 
disk_config and adding the preserve_always works perfectly with 3.4.7.

Thanks!

Craig