Dyltone

Windows Defender present and Nod32 for AV, no spikes in processor at all (using Process Explorer to monitor). I may want to try Filemon/Regmon to track down what's going on.

ANY folder name, ANY file name, existing or new, large or small, ANY location on C: , haven't tried one of the other drives (just thought of doing that when I was typing this out). I'll try out another drive when I get home after 7pm EST. I really don't know what could be causing it, but I'm sure there is some thing like an indexing service that is causing it (waiting for it to update a table or something similar). Let me know if you have any ideas.... Thanks!

Sorry bro I wish I could have helped earlier, I also called M$ and specifically asked about "inplace upgrade" and "sysprep" and both were blown off by my Indian technician (Michael). I consider myself an expert with XP having done HAL injection and other things M$ told me was impossible, but I had zero experience with Vista sysprep and apparently they changed everything except the executable name. Small update on my system, it's is up and running but I'm having one really weird issue that I'll probably end up reinstalling to try to remedy. I can create a new folder on the desktop and type "asdf" as the name of the folder and explorer will hang for a long time (about a minute) before it names the folder. Other apps seem responsive during this time, but the folder is inaccessible until it's named. Then without doing anything to the folder, I click delete and the folder disappears immediately, but file delete progress bar comes up and takes another minute (apporx) just to delete the file. The new HD I bought is a 10k raptor so I'm 99.9% sure that's not the problem, Vista reports Primary hard disk transfer rate as a 5.9 out of 6.0. Anyone have a clue what could cause this weird situation? I may post this as a new thread since this one doesn't get a lot of "attention" any longer.

I'm not sure it's the same thing, but my previous MB chipset and new chipset were too far different for Vista to deal with it without "help". I'm pretty sure M$ wanted Vista to move from chipset to chipset for VM to physical and the other way around, but I doubt they care if joe homeuser can move his existing HD from his old workstation to a new one easily.

I ended up taking a ghost in current state (for backup) to a new HD then doing an IN PLACE upgrade of Vista Ultimate on the new drive. I had to re-installed the MB/Video/etc drivers, all security patches, and re-activate afterward. No more sysprep screen and no more auto logon screen. After all this, I'm 99% sure I'm going to just blow the drive away and do a fresh install. I'm finding it hard to trust all the "work-arounds". But hey, this is how I learn best about what is possible and not just what is supported.

Bump

If what you say is true, then what exactly did running Sysprep /generalize /audit /shutdown do? Is it like a "dry run" of Sysprep? Why would anyone want/need the /audit switch? What was the comparible switch from Sysprep 2.0? I can say that it definately stripped the chipset drivers since these were auto detected (PNP) on next boot in the new computer (which was my goal from the beginning). I did not use the /oobe switch for fear it would have deleted my user profile. If I run sysprep again, from the GUI or command line, with OOBE enabled (only other choice) will it wipe my user profiles? I tried looking for a sysprep /clean type command in the new application but I can't seem to find anything like this. If running Sysprep again won't do anything except cause me to re-install drivers and activate Windows again, I'll do it, but if there are any issues with losing user configuration or profile information I'll have to find a work around. I can't believe that this Sysprep autologon is "invisible" and "un-removable". It's got to be somewhere in the registry! Any info you can provide will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, AJ Edit: I found this article for removing (undoing) mini-setup from an XP workstation... Any thoughts? http://www.jsifaq.com/SF/Tips/Tip.aspx?id=5442

Upgraded my MB/CPU/RAM/VIDEO from Intel 965P, ATI Video, P4 3.0 to Nvidia 680i, Nvidia Video, C2D 2.4 Un-installed my old video drivers and restarted. Ran Sysprep /generalize /audit /shutdown I didn't use any answer files of any time. Put all new equipment in old case and booted up. Plug and play allowed all chipset drivers to load and the system loaded without major issue. Installed all the new drivers from the web (video, chipset, sound, etc), no dings in device manager, everything looks good except... Now, the system tries to logon as Administrator with Blank Password, My admin account has a password so it fails, it lets me click switch user to logon as myself. Once I logon, I'm presented with the sysprep GUI screen. I close that and everything is normal. I figured sysprep needed to complete something so I blanked the admin password, rebooted and let it autologon. That worked fine but the admin logon got the same sysprep GUI. Reboot, no change, still auto logs on to admin and presents sysprep GUI. I put password back on admin account so now when the auto logon fails I use switch user option and logon as myself and close the sysprep GUI. I check registry locations for auto logon info, can't find any, used autoruns (sysinternals) and can't find any sysprep entries, used hijack this, same deal, no sysprep entries. I'm looking for any ideas of what I may have missed and why I'm getting this auto logon behavior.