...in order to streamline the use of nlite to install Windows XP Home SP2 (2002) for my personal use, I've come to a few conclusions that might help other people customizing the install CD for use on their own single home computer: 1) I finally settled on running nlite several times piecemeal in order to alter Dino's procedure order. The second and later times I loaded the modified files off my hard drive. First I ran only Unattended to select the CPU type and enter the product code. Then I ran it again to remove unnecessary hardware components. Then I ran it to remove basic install CD support for things like sound and video, which I can slipstream third-party drivers for. Then I slipstreamed select hofixes, including IE7. Then I removed certain components I find a nuisance, such as Search Assistant. Then I put in my tweaks. 2) If you know your CPU type you can delete a great deal of useless junk from the Hardware tab of Components. This includes quite a few items Dino has in red. For example, I have an ACPI uniprocessor CPU, so I can safely get rid of Hercules and AMD support right off the bat. When I reran nlite the list of components had changed and I was able to pare them down even further. This makes the Setup portion of install much smoother, faster and cleaner because the installer isn't loading a bunch of stuff it's just going to have to delete. 3) I possess slipstreamable third-party drivers for some of my hardware, such as sound and video, so I removed basic sound and video support from Components before slipstreaming the drivers. This made the install much cleaner. In the case of my faxmodem, although I deleted modem support before slipstreaming the driver, modem support somehow got reintegrated during the driver slipstream process, although I have no idea from where. Also, I used to have to update my USB drivers through Device Manager before my printer install software could detect my USB printer; but once I had removed *all* printer support, including the USB printer item in Components, that was no longer necessary. 4) Using my existing activated install of XP, I went to the Microsoft Download Center and used Advanced Search to find only the hotfixes I was interested in. I searched for "Windows XP" with the filter of "All" for OSs, sorted by date order, with 50 listings per window. By opening download and knowledge base pages in new windows, I was able to find the 20 or so hotfixes that I was interested in. Not everything you can download from MDC works as a hotfix, but lots of it does. You can slipstream IE7 but not WMP11. With IE7 it doesn't matter whether a hotfix was released before or after IE7 was released; nlite is smart enough to slipstream everything in the right order, so you only have to run the hotfixer once. But unless you want a great deal of clutter and crap in your installed OS, the hotfix application should occur after you've pared down your components and installed third-party drivers. With WMP11, unfortunately, you still have to rely on Microsoft Update making decisions for you, but at least use Custom install. Note that slipstreaming doesn't work for .NET Framework 2.0, which has been superseded and is now basically freeware. You still have to grow a beard to the floor waiting for it to install off Update or from the redistributable. 5) Because the component list is dynamic--it changes every time you rerun nlite--I settled on waiting until I had a fully up to date set of raw files on my hard drive before removing nuisance components. The tweaks list is also dynamic, so I found it useful to run nlite separately for tweaks as a last step. 6) The maximized compression and ISO optimization actually slowed down my install because the files on the CD were overcompressed. 7) I could skip a lot of yunque at the start of install by removing all partitions from my target hard drive before firing up my computer. My BIOS has an automatic A: C: D: boot sequence, so if there is nothing in the floppy or on the hard drive it automatically boots off CD and goes straight to the "setup is checking your system configuration" page. I haven't been able to find a bootable partition nuker I can afford, so I used my old DOS 6.22 install disk, which starts off by nuking the primary partition and asking you to reboot, so I just popped out the floppy and pressed enter. During Windows XP Home install you do have to delete the 2-gig DOS partition created by the DOS install diskette, but that's only a minor nuisance. 8) The Unattended portion of nlite is unspeakably flaky and pretty much useless. The only things it consistently remembers to do is put in your product code and choose your CPU type. It forgets all other things almost at random. The theme and background you boot into are a total crapshoot. I recommend that the Unattended portion be replaced by a simple GUI that asks you for your product code and CPU type. All replies warmly invited.