Product Dimensions

I have several items and the business views these items according to a number of attributes linked to the item:
- Product category
- Product source (manufactured, purchased, transferred)
- Brand
- Flavour
- Packing Group

The Packing Group is a combination of attributes which defines the size of a pack (bottle size, cap type, things like that). There is never a set hierarchy as to how these are viewed. I've thought about modelling items as:
1. Create a star-schema dimension which has Product category then Product, and have a bunch of attributes hanging off Product
2. Create virtual dimensions based on these attributes

However, this seems problematic to me as the Packing Group has its own attributes. I then consider I might need a "physical" star-schema dimension for each of the above classifications. Is this the right way to go? Can any body suggest a better way or point me to some examples? I'm running AS 2000.

Upgrade to 2005

The last time I did this in AS 2000, I was representing customer demographics - race, gender, age range, income range, etc), I created a physical dimension table in my star to represent each unique combination of attributes. then I created an AS dimension for each attribute. Performance was pretty poor.