Volatus

I get the distinct, and very unfortunate, feeling that this particular user has absolutely no idea how nLite works or what it is designed to do, by the following points: 1) Selected C:\WINDOWS as the folder to operate on. No excuses. You selected it. nLite would never do such a thing. 2) Spoke about an unfinished nLite error - even though that error is brought up by selecting a folder that's unfinished - that is, your WINDOWS FOLDER AGAIN! 3) Thinks that nLite has anything to do with a clean install or upgrade/repair... I think someone needs to take the fork out of forkprong's hands before he shoves it in the outlet again... Can someone help point him in the direction of detailing exactly what nLite does? Like, that it creates an installation DISC, not modifies an existing installation...?

Simply put, not every single person that runs Vista needs all the languages of the world consuming 1.4gb of space. MS should be smarter than that, to have it filter out (or at least ASK) what language(s) people want to use, if even more than one. As it is, MS is forcing all this junk on everyone's computers... hell, XP already does this to a lesser extent, but at least it only provides the ability to display such things, as opposed to 1.4gb of "international support". *shakes fist* I guess the bloat epidemic began with Windows Installer and its obsessive "protection" system - keeping a copy of the flippin' installer sitting on the hard drive and corrupting the program if you opt to remove it manually. Now Vista itself is built around the same "redundancy" system, causing all sorts of problems for people that actually want control over their systems. If MS didn't want people to modify Windows, they should have made Windows customizable like they did in the old days of '95 (to at least an extent). Hell, the fact that they don't even ask basic questions like "do you really need all these languages installed?" - questions on the same basic level as time zone and clock settings (which I often leave as default, being in the default Pacific time zone) - shows MS doesn't even give a hell. As it is, I vLitened the original disc without doing SP1 and installed it. It installed much quicker, spending a lot less time at "completing installation" (but still a good amount - much more than logical for "completing"...), sped through the desktop-wallpaper "in limbo" moments, and got me to my desktop in darn near "impressive for Vista" time. From there I found everything working about as nicely as Vista is capable of, but still not as good as XP. It only consumed 3.5gb of disk space and 360mb RAM, which kind-of brings me to my final point... An operating system should not be the center of your computer's performance. Nobody should have to upgrade their hardware just to run a new version of a software application designed to facilitate running software applications. I can run Windows XP on every piece of hardware crossing my bedroom, from a 400MHz Celeron (sitting in the corner) to my main Core 2 Duo system. Vista is something that actually makes someone have to upgrade a computer just to get, well... to get an OS with improved back-end code to make the bloated front-end work almost as well as the last version. Superfetch and ReadyBoost just compensate for Vista's bloat... and try to make it work as well as XP does without all that garbage. Even more XP tweaks and you have a computer that makes Vista look like "wait, is this the old version or the new one?"... And don't even get me started on Mac OS X vs Vista.

ME was actually more stable on my Palmax PD1000 mininotebook (one of the first UMPCs of yesteryear), than the preinstalled Win98. It gave me precisely 1 BSOD every time it started up (which I was too n00b to troubleshoot at the time I owned it) but after that, it was rock solid, at least as solid as Win9x can be. I never did understand the hype regarding only ME being terrible, but I class it all as "windows 9x in general sucked". Granted, NT-based systems use a lot more memory... Anyway, I don't really know about Vista sales. I've noticed a strange phenomenon online that can only be described as night and day. Online, there seem to be a LARGE number of people that swear by Vista and say there's nothing at all wrong with it, that my computer just sucks, etc etc etc... whereas offline, in the "real world", there's not a single person that can say anything good about Vista - in fact, many people I talk to say they won't buy a new computer because they all include Vista (even if it can be removed). There are quite few people online that actually voice up about Vista's failure. Unfortunately, the internet is where communication occurs... so if nobody's dissing Vista online... Vista proliferates and XP dies. The world is a strange place. [/longpost]

Yes, I fully place the blame on Windows Vista. Know why? XP never had even CLOSE to issues like this. Hell, XP can recover and be in a usable state even after removing the disc halfway through Windows setup. XP's setup is bulletproof, although it still had its problems. They were nothing near as bad a problem as not even being able to use the computer because an official service pack wouldn't install on the version of Windows it was designed to upgrade. The hardware I used is absolutely nowheres near a problem. It would be a problem and I would have no complaints if it failed to install on an old P3 system I've got laying around. If there is a problem, Windows should TELL ME about the problem instead of hiding it all behind a fancy facade of automation. Automation is what made Vista so terrible as it is - setting all your defaults wrong and assuming everyone is completely idiotic. Many software installers have a "custom" mode for a reason - a reason MS totally forgot about with Vista - to make life easier on those of us that like to know what's going on. It IS Vista's problem. It's not even nuhi's problem, because his software shouldn't have to beat around MS's glitchy installers. Please tell me why MS made it even MORE difficult to slipstream a service pack now? It was easy to do with XP, and is something that's even become routine. Instead of making it easier to do, they seem to have completely screwed it up. Nobody ever told me that problems like this would occur "if" I did "this" or "that". All the pieces fit together and now I'm left with a jumbled pile of crap. And you can't deny that Vista doesn't inexplicably take an unnecessarily long time to "complete installation" or sit at the desktop background for 15 odd minutes. It does that on any computer. MS should have put more time into that little-known area of the company previously known as "quality assurance" (which is now, I'm guessing, known as "the break room")... edit: Also, more on your point... RTM is the OFFICIAL BUILD. RTM is what SP1 should be built onto. I actually intentionally seeked out an unmodified retail disc in order to slipstream and install it, as it didn't have any additional crap built onto it that would break installation. Installing a service pack onto an already-installed copy of Windows is just asking for trouble, especially one already v/nLitened. So with that common knowledge, I installed SP1 onto the image, then removed the crap Vista shouldn't've come with - in particular, speech support, natural language search, and LANGUAGES. After this edit, I'll attach my vLite settings file too. Last_Session.ini

Crapola. Well, I guess that scraps my idea of testing Vista SP1. No way am I installing Vista on any computer without vLitening it first.

Thing is, I wasn't installing it. It was pre-installed. If you notice, I also say it keeps rebooting, over and over and over and over and over... it processes something (at "100% completed" the whole time) for about 5 minutes then reboots back to doing the same thing over and over. Isn't that a problem? edit: May be related to this: http://www.msfn.org/board/Vlite-116-Vista-SP1-t114712.html

You're probably further destroying your computer the more you keep trying to solve surface problems like this... I can guarantee you that those files were NOT deleted or modified by nLite or any other program for that matter. I've never seen a program do that, ever. nLite certainly wouldn't, unless its supporting runtime, the bastardic .NET Framework, itself caused problems. Stop trying to solve the immediately visible problems... for example, Windows will tell you it can't find hal.dll if the entire partition or Windows folder is corrupt. Creating a Windows folder and putting hal.dll in there won't fix anything. Running chkdsk on the drive probably will. So with that, have you run chkdsk on the drive yet? The Windows install CD based chkdsk is really crappy, and doesn't usually even fix any problems. You'll have to slave the drive to another computer, or use another installation, to check it... (edit: I'm dying to know what flaming went on in here... haha. Funny that people are so passionate about nLite, but those same people would turn around and trash vLite. Hmm...)

I can certainly see how useless Google has become in those screenshots

Crap. So does this explain why my Vista test install is stuck in a "Installing Service Pack: Step 3 of 3 - 100% complete" -> "Shutting down..." -> reboot -> repeat loop? I slipstreamed SP1 into an original Vista disc image, removed a bunch of crap that should never have come with Vista, and installed it... it worked fine (about as "fine" as Vista CAN install) up until this blasted "installing service pack" message. Just continuing proof that Vista sucks huge amounts of arse. vLite-like support should have been included with Vista, yet they seem to have instead broken support for it.

Ah, so the error you're getting is in Windows, not in the installer? So from what I'm gathering, you say there's no problem, but I don't know if that means there's an audio device listed or not. Does it show "Realtek High Definition Audio" in the audio devices area? If so, and there's still no device listed, there may be some more things you can try out. None of which involve a UAA patch you need to request from Microsoft.

So I decided to take the "plunge" and install Vista on a junker computer to give it another worthwhile try after SP1 came out. It took a lot of convincing myself that Vista is worth even glancing at again, after seeing it on ALL new computers and seeing how TERRIBLY SLOW it makes all these potentially blazing-fast PCs... I figure vLite had also come a long way. Last time I tried Vista on my personal computer, it was right AT Vista launch time, running the RTM version of Vista on a 1.4GHz Pentium-M laptop with 1gb RAM, Radeon 7500 or some crap... and I thought it was kinda cool. But it ended up sucking, very quickly, with broken drivers, horrible performance, etc... and nothing at all was better than XP plus some add-ons. Now I'm installing Vista again on a 2.7GHz Celeron with 512mb RAM and a 10gb HDD I had laying around. Right off the bat, yes, I know 10gb is small for Vista (why should it be? Vista is a freaking operating system, it should NOT be that big...), but I vLitened it first. Here's what I've done so far: Spent about 4 hours downloading SP1 (half an hour) and using vLite to integrate SP1 into the image, then cleaning out the crap NOBODY needs in Vista. Evidently, 256mb wasn't enough, so I installed 512mb. Vista's user-input end of the installation process was simple enough. Skipped the serial entry, deleted the XP partition, had it start installing using all the other defaults. Waited, and waited, and waited. Copying files, installing updates, installing blah... reboot... (1) Okay... now we're back at copying files. And, finally, completing installation. Half an hour (or more?) later, it's STILL COMPLETING INSTALLATION. AN HOUR LATER and it's STILL completing installation?!!! OKAY, FINALLY, it's rebooted into Windows (2), it seems to be done. Windows is installing files, or something like that. Cool, this looks familiar! Choose a username... and a password... and an icon... cool. Then a computer name (Vistrash). Then a wallpaper. Sounds cool. ... ... It's a blank desktop. Just... a wallpaper... and a lot of grinding of the hard drive. ... 15 minutes later it's still grinding away at that wallpaper. FINALLY it puts something on the screen to the effect of "testing your computer's performance". Random reboot (3). Totally random. No error, no shutdown, just computer rebooted halfway through the "test". WHAT?! Enter my username AGAIN?! This whole thing AGAIN?! My username is in use?! What is this crap? If it's in use, OBVIOUSLY I DID THIS ALREADY! *slams head into desk* At least it didn't have the 20 odd minutes of blank desktop this time. Right into, and through, the "test". "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (4) Huh?! "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 0... 99... 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (5) Wait... I hope it's done THIS time... I've never SEEN an installation need to reboot THIS MANY TIMES... "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 0... 99... 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (6) Okay... this is strange... "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 0... 99... 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (7) It's stuck in a loop, isn't it? "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 0... 99... 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (8) This s*** is just annoying now. "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 0... 99... 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (9) Damnit, that's it, I'm posting this on MSFN. "Installing Service Pack: stage 3 of 3 - 0... 99... 100% Complete. Please do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down..." *reboot* (10) I HATE VISTA. I hate Vista... as I type, it's on its 11th reboot (or so, I lost count, it just does it automatically). I'm guessing this isn't normal, but then again, what IS normal anyway? Vista is absolutely the worst operating system I've ever had the displeasure of "beta testing" for Microsoft. Any advice? edit: I gave up on the reboot loop just now. Its 13th reboot and I just hit the power button during POST. Screw that crap.

Have you tried actually installing the device through Device Manager, using "update driver"? Is there an audio device with a yellow "!" or is there an "Unknown device" yellow "?" icon for it? In either case, can you give me the short version of the "Device Instance ID" (found on the Details tab of the properties page) - for example, my Realtek HD Audio device's ID is "HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_1462745A&REV_1000\4&25AEE446&0&0001", but all I really need to know is VEN_10EC&DEV_0888. edit: I am indisputable proof that the UAA patch is not needed for a Realtek HD audio driver to work properly.

Wow, Vista versus XP are definitely night-and-day with *Lite opinions. With XP, nobody would ever recommend installing XP without using nLite first. With Vista, at least in this topic, vLite is like: "Quote the same phrase Microsoft has been saying for years about not modifying Windows. Never modify Windows. You are doing bad things. Vista is a good OS with 500mb of speech support, 1.4gb of languages nobody uses, and 500 more MB of 'natural language' support you, too, will probably never use. Install it all!" As it is, I'm giving Vista one more shot on a junker P4/2.6 system I had laying around in pieces. After SP1 came out, I figure I'll give it another worthwhile chance. No way am I letting it mess up my main C2D system though. I integrated SP1 into an original (but downloaded) Vista disc, then stripped a bunch of stuff out. So far, the only error I've had is that my test computer didn't have enough memory (it had 256mb). So I switched it with a stick of 512 and now it's crunching along happily. I know I won't be needing any patches or cracks because I won't be using it more than a week.

Why should he need that patch? I've installed a few computers' Realtek HD audio drivers (including my own) in XP, and never in my life have I had to "request" a hotfix from MS support. So why should this guy need the patch? =\ Meanwhile, have you tried the Realtek audio drivers from... well, Realtek?

It does. o_O Few thoughts to this: First of all, this is the wrong forum. * Second, this is probably a problem that could have been caused by _ANY_ program. Chances are, for hal.dll to go missing, your hard drive probably became corrupt. Look into figuring out what hardware problem caused your hard drive to get scrambled s*** data. If you're using an 80-conductor ATA133 cable, take a look into tracking down an old 40-conductor cable and try using that instead. But it's going to be a unanimous conclusion that nLite is not at fault here... unless of course, you did something stupid like selecting your Windows folder for where to place the temporary files! Even then, it would have copied an i386 folder and so-on... totally independent of your Windows install. *meh* edit: * - this topic was originally in the WinXP forum.

I have no problem running SP2 at the moment, but I'm itching to get SP3 so I don't have to reformat my newly created computers so quickly after having installed it (because god knows installing a service pack is asking for trouble - always slipstream ). SP2 + RyanVM Update Pack = bliss. I tried out SP3 in a virtual machine and wasn't too impressed. It really seems like just all MS's current updates rolled into one package, big whoop. MS turned evil as soon as they started pushing Vista on ALL computers (even the pieces of "crap" with 512mb RAM) so there's no way they can do anything useful anymore. I'm sticking with XP til the bitter end (even, yes, on my shiny new Core 2 Duo system), because Vista is just such s***e, but it's all MS will ever push now. Honestly, I can't believe Vista is rolling along in the market right now so much better than WinME. Vista is much worse than ME ever was. Somehow it's actually gaining ground. Hopefully it'll end up dying just like ME though... =\ [/rant] SP3 or no SP3, I'm happy

Nope, it's off, that's the first thing I disable (usually with nLite before it's even installed). It should also be mentioned: - I can access other computers from the "source" computer normally. - The "problem" computer shows the correct username in the failure audit event (but shows the "domain" as my source computer's name, is that supposed to be there?) I had forgotten about that simple file sharing thing, but alas... no such luck. edit: .... I don't believe it. Simple File Sharing was turned on, on the PROBLEM computer! Are you kidding me? I can't believe that would cause such a massive headache. I guess I should get back into the habit of doing tweaks on the computer, because I assumed nLite had, like it always did, disabled simple file sharing for me (in my preset). s***. Well, that solves that problem! Thanks for giving my brain the kick it needed

Well, I hope the title managed to relay the problem... I have several computers on my network, mostly using the same login details. When I want to share info between them, I use the same Windows login name and password on them. The computers I loan to other people in the local area to use, I use auto-login with the password. Not the most secure method, but it works. Recently, I ran into a curious problem with one of those computers. It refused my network login to access its network share (the c$ administrative share) and presented me with the "guest" login prompt (where the username is "guest" and greyed out). I then worked my way backwards and found that it will not let me in to ANY resource requiring a login. I switched on auditing on the problem computer, and found that it was denying my login with "Unknown user name or bad password". I then tried enabling the Administrator account by adding a password (the same password as usual), and it did the exact same thing - Unknown user name or bad password. I try to access the administrative tools (MMC modules) on that computer remotely, and every access results in "Unknown user name or bad password". However, if I try to access my desktop from the problem computer, it works just as it should - logging in with its current login, and not asking for anything. Now that's strange. Someone please give me some advice here... I've run out of ideas. Sometimes MS software just does weird s***.

Bumpity bump bump! (instead of starting a new topic ) I'm finding the search function here horribly problematic as well. When searching a forum for more than one word, it treats it as "Or" - that is, if I search for "windows keys don't work", it'll include topics with the word "windows", the word "keys", the word "don't", or the word "work", instead of topics with all of them! When I searched for that, I literally got returned the entire forum I searched, including all stickies. I don't know of a single person on the planet that would want to search for something using an "or" mechanism... it's got to be confusing for people! Using Google across this site isn't much helpful either... Google has gotten progressively worse over the years. So to get around that, I had to do "+windows +keys +don't +work", but I shouldn't have to add plusses behind each word just to search for something. That should be the default behavior, right? Just my three cents, since search is such an important part of any informative forum like this.

Odd problem here... never seen anything like it. I'm putting together an ancient system for someone that wants a $50 computer system (laff please). It's a Pentium II/350 with 192mb RAM, 4.3gb HDD, a CD-ROM, a 15" CRT, and a plain old keyboard and 2-button mouse, with a legal version of Win2K Pro, CD key ripped from a dead, gutted laptop of mine. Problem is, the keyboard has three keys that don't work: the left and right Windows keys, and the "shortcut"/"menu" key. I can't figure out what's wrong with it. I can't determine if it's the computer or the keyboard itself, since neither Yahoo, Google, nor Ask would give me any useful information or links to a keyboard scan code viewer. I don't understand why search engines have gotten so useless over the years (but they're far better than MSFN's search engine, which I'm about to go complain about in another topic). I know I can have Windows remap scan codes, so if the keyboard is spitting out a different scan code (don't understand how, it's "designed for Windows 2000"), I can remap it. Or maybe it's got a bad driver loaded ("Standard 101/102-key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard")? I hope it's not an internal problem, everything looks fine inside the keyboard and I just cleaned it! This is killing me, because I always use Win+R and Win+D to get things done! I keep Win+R'ing and screwing up my "vibe" when it sits there and types "r" on the screen!

Wow, this is some extremely valuable information - on how to restart the Windows XP OOBE process. The first reply with the registry key worked great. The computer didn't have internet access, so I didn't bother writing the whole reg file, I just opened Registry Editor and keyed in the information. If it hasn't already been mentioned, the raw data in that "hex" key is actually "C:\Windows\System32\oobe\msoobe.exe /f /retail" in Unicode (or some other 16-bit language). I just keyed that in (since it was Dell OEM, I switched "retail" for "oem") and switched OobeInProgress to 1, and rebooted... bam, OOBE. World's biggest bump.

Ah-HAH! After cross-referencing the procmon.exe output of monitoring regsvr32 on both my desktop and the new living room PC with the problem (swallow THAT sentence, why don't ye?), I figured it out! SUCCESS! You were missing a file! You also need to copy slbrccsp.dll to the computer! Registration of slbcsp.dll was failing because it couldn't find that file but it didn't tell anyone, iTunes was missing the support of that chain of files, and wouldn't tell anyone either. Don't you love having to tie a debugger to these things to figure out what pieces they're missing? Finally, the last known instance of iTunes failing to start is squished. Finally, I can run the latest version of iTunes! I was stuck on 7.4 (I believe) before this, I guess because it didn't rely on that file.

Hrmm, this is surely a curious one. I have the same problem, and after scouring the internet and not being able to find any useful information, I'm back here since I suspected it was an nLite-induced problem. I don't usually nLiten my installations as hard as I did for my living room computer, which I was actually reformatting to try solving the iTunes problem!! I, too, removed the Smartcards support. I restored the files, and iTunes still didn't work. I then tried registering them (using the right-click-menu-tweak "register" option). Two files registered, two others didn't - scarddlg.dll didn't, because it wasn't registerable, but slbcsp.dll "failed" to initialize. It "initialized" properly on my desktop, which it came from, but on the new computer it "failed". I'm in the process of figuring out just what registering slbcsp.dll does... hopefully solving that problem will resolve the iTunes problem! edit: Attached INI file. LAST_SESSION.INI

Side question: can the opposite also be a sign of bad caps? That is, starts up and runs great for hours, then, even with extremely low power consumption (underclocked CPU to lowest possible setting), like clockwork, it starts rebooting (with Machine Check and "Hardware Failure" BSODs), until I let it sit off for another several hours? I've got a side-project computer that's doing that and it's driving me batty... before that, though, it was the power supply

Dumb idea, but have you tried reinstalling the WGA controls? (edit: since after all, WGA is an add-on to WinXP...)