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Your questions have all been answered in the above posts. But perhaps in more detail than you wanted? If you own OEM XP Home edition then activation was very likely done by the maker of your computer at their factory. It may need to be reactivated by you if you make substantial hardware changes to your computer. The details about Retail, Professional, and VLK's (Volume License Keys) are then not pertinent to your situation.

Correct. They also can't access your website unless their computer is on. You may wish to do some research, (i. e. reading), to find out how to administer your own web server and what it involves.

Answering poll questions isn't stupid per se. Answering stupid polls is. I look at some of the polls to gain useful insight from knowledgeable people. I look at plenty of forum topics on MSFN but don't add reply comments to them all. I only reply (or vote) if I think I might add some value. I can think of no value to polls like "Where are you from?" or "How old are you?" Let's keep the polls to meaningful topics.

Sounds like you've had some terrible luck mate. I'm not particularly adept at analysing Hijackthis logs, but nothing in your log jumps out at me. Spybot is not a bad idea. In my experience it sometimes finds things that Ad-Aware doesn't, and vice versa. I ran across an article at www.Sysinternals.com recently, (Mark's blog dated August 28, 2005), that describes how one might troubleshoot system slowness and hangs. There are some very handy tools there, some of which might help you straigten things out on your system. Good luck.

I can't speak to the quality of the products, but a quick search turned up Sophos Anti-Virus and InJoy Firewall, both of which claim to support Windows 2003 Server. 30-day evaluations are available for download.

The existing folder named OEM is not the same as the $OEM$ folder that is described in the Unattended Guide. As the Guide says, create new folders in the right part of the hierarchy and with exactly the right names and all will work out.

I don't know exactly how MCE switches CD's. But if you're looking for a utility that will allow you do something similar, then I suggest you read this post:CDSwitch

This may help with your Control Panel issue: Disable Control Panel

First you have to be sure that adjacent machines are communicating with each other, (i. e. LED's are lit from one NIC to another all the way through). Once you know there's a Physical path from one machine to another all the way through you must establish that the Data Link layer is functioning. For instance, do the 802.11b and 802.11g devices communicate properly? Once you've verified that the Data Link layer is fully functional then you must ensure that the IP (Network layer) configurations are proper. Every device needs an IP address, a subnet mask, and a default gateway. The addresses must be unique, the mask of every device must be identical to that of its neighbour, and the default gateway of every device must be the IP host address of its upstream neighbour (the path that leads it to the Internet).

Not correct Vicky. The duplex mode has nothing to do with cable pinouts. Duplex mode, and speed, are negotiated by the two NIC's after connection has been established through the cable. Bear in mind that anything connected through a hub must operate in half-duplex mode. As was stated above the only time you need a crossover cable is when you're connecting two PC's together directly, or a PC directly to a router. Most of today's switches can automatically detect which pins to use for Transmit and Receive functions.

When Windows first came out a lot of people said things like "Microsoft is finally catching on to what Apple did five years ago." And now that Microsoft has created their Virtual Desktop powertoy they're catching up with what Unix did as a standard feature ten years ago. It seems to me that Microsoft OS's tend to be increasingly geared to making it easy for the "average" user, and not toward the industrial strength "corporate" user. This site exists to supply information to those people who support Microsoft networks. Windows, by its fundamental organization, does not lend itself to corporate deployment. That support ability has to be manufactured by smart people who read a lot. And every Service Pack that's issued wipes out all the hard work that the support techs have done to automagically apply all the patches and updates for their clients. They have to start over again. What's RyanVM going to do if and when XP SP3 comes out? He'll start by deleting a bunch of files he'd created to patch SP2. They were hard to create and useful to plenty of people...and then they'll be garbage. I think we're all victimized by the fundamental mis-organization of Windows. I'm just glad I get paid for working on it instead of paying to use it.

Perfect. That's exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you for your help.

I wonder if there's a way to prevent Windows Update from insisting that I need to download Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool on the second Tuesday of every month? Those of us who religiously maintain anti-virus software on our systems don't need Microsoft's tool. Is there perhaps a registry tweak that would serve my purpose, along the lines of the GDI+ Detection tool one?

Thank you for reminding me about the \" in the RunOnceEx Guide. I knew that before, but I'd forgotten. The more new information I shove into this old brain, the more old information seems to fall out. Last week I forgot my bank card PIN and by next week I might forget my name. With your reminder I finally got the RunOnceEx syntax right, and the entries lodged in the registry. It seems to all work just fine, although the syntax is somewhat cumbersome. For the record, (if anybody cares), my RunOnceEx.cmd entry is as follows: REG ADD %KEY%\060 /VE /D "Microsoft Office XP SP3" /f REG ADD %KEY%\060 /V 1 /D "cdswitch Office_XP %CDROM% /d /w /r:\"%CDROM%\setup.exe TRANSFORMS=Office.MST /qn"\" /f As the RunOnceEx Guide says "If there is an application that has a series of complicated switches with lots of quotation marks, consider putting them into a separate .cmd file instead and launching from RunOnceEx, because it would get too messy putting those switches directly into RunOnceEx."

I'm unable to get the /r: parameter to work if there are options and switches to be supplied to the install program. Even with the install string enclosed within double quotes, as you show in your example above, it doesn't work. I can see that the entires aren't being properly inserted into the RunOnceEx registry key, which tells me that there's a syntax error that the registry editor doesn't like. I can correct this by removing the double quotes around /r:"%CDROM%\setup.exe TRANSFORMS=Office.MST /qn" But then cdswitch doesn't recognize the options and switches that are required by the installation program. I was able to get the installation working by using separate lines within RunOnceEx.cmd to initiate cdswitch, then run the installation, then revert back to the original CD. Is there something still not right with the /r: option, or am I doing something wrong?

The devil is in the details Thanks again.

FYI - I'm using RunOnceEx, not GuiRunOnce. The /d switch to disable autorun seems to work quite well. However I've had trouble using it with /a: . While installing Office XP I cannot get the TRANSFORMS= and /qb- parameters executed properly within a batch file. No matter where I put double-quotes the best I can seem to do is run setup.exe without operands. I've resorted to inserting cdswitch.exe into a REG ADD %KEY% statement as follows: REG ADD %KEY%\060 /VE /D "Microsoft Office XP SP3" /f REG ADD %KEY%\060 /V 1 /D "cdswitch.exe Office_XP %CDROM% /d" /f REG ADD %KEY%\060 /V 2 /D "%CDROM%\setup.exe TRANSFORMS=Office.MST /qb-" /f This seems to work. (NOTE that Office.MST is the renamed Unattended.MST, suggested by someone that 8.3 might be a problem. I'm not sure it is.) I then need to apply the KB885884 patch. I do this by adding into my RunOnceEx.cmd file: REG ADD %KEY%\060 /V 3 /D "%CDROM%\Q885884.exe /q /o /n /z" /f I then switch back to my regular Unattended XP installation CD with REG ADD %KEY%\060 /V 4 /D "cdswitch.exe WXPPFP_EN %CDROM% /d" /f and all is well from there. It's a lot simpler than the post I submitted a couple of days ago. There's no batch file to create or execute. Thank you to Nanaki, AaronXP, gosh, and the others for giving me the tools and clues to figure this one out.

I've found the cdswitch utility very helpful. But I still have some issues, which I'll try to describe briefly. I'm trying to install Office XP from a second disc using RunOnceEx.cmd. It calls Office.cmd which is to install Office XP, slipstreamed with Office XP SP3, and a patch referenced in KB885884. A snippet of my RunOnceEx code follows: cmdow @ /HID @echo off FOR %%i IN (D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) DO IF EXIST %%i:\CD.txt SET CDROM=%%i: SET KEY=HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx REG ADD %KEY% /V TITLE /D "Installing Applications" /f (portions omitted) REG ADD %KEY%\060 /VE /D "Microsoft Office XP SP3" /f REG ADD %KEY%\060 /V 1 /D "%CDROM%\software\Office.cmd" /f (more portions omitted) EXIT After Office XP is installed, I want to return to the Windows XP installation CD and continue with other progam installations. The issue I'm having is with Autorun. When I insert the Office XP CD which contains autorun.inf it automatically runs the setup.exe file contained within. This is not what I want. I want it to run setup.exe with the "TRANSFORMS=%CDROM%\Unattended.MST" and "/qb-" parameters, as per the Unattended Office Installation Guide. I have learned that I can disable Autorun through a registry tweak: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 ;Disable Autorun on CD-ROM drive [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=dword:00000020 And I've coded this tweak into a batch file, executed by Office.cmd, so that before installing the Office XP CD Autorun is disabled. However, application of this registry tweak requires stopping and restarting explorer.exe. Hence, I have also added: taskkill /im explorer.exe start /wait %SYSTEMROOT%\explorer.exe into Office.cmd When the Office XP installation is complete I use cdswitch to return to the Windows XP installation disc. And then I wish to retore Autorun functionality, which again requires stopping and restarting explorer.exe. Therefore, Office.cmd contains: REGEDIT /S %CDROM%\restoreAutorun.reg taskkill /im explorer.exe start /wait %SYSTEMROOT%\explorer.exe at the end. FYI restoreAutorun.reg sets [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=dword:00000091 This seems to me to be a lot of stopping and restarting of explorer.exe, with alerts being generated across the screen every time this basic function of Windows is shut down ungracefully. Permanently disabling Autorun through regtweaks.reg (applied via cmdlines.txt) is not appropriate. I only want it temporarily disabled. Am I over-complicating things? All I really want to do is temporarily switch to another CD. cdswitch helps me do that, but doesn't get around the Autorun issues. To get around them I seem to be pressed to modify registry settings and stop and restart processes multiple times. Can anyone think of a simple way to temporarily disable Autorun, or have cdswitch ignore autorun.inf?