This seems to be a VMWare issue. I experience the same problem, but yet, when i run my UA in VirtualBox all is good! Don't ask me why, but it must be a settings or some sort of misconfiguration within VMWare? I Spent stressful hours trying to sort this out, $OEM$ not getting copied over etc... But when reading these forums I cam across a thread that had an similar issue. Within that thread some one said that he uses VirtualBox and advised him to try that out - So i thought ill try it too. Lo and behold, it worked! $OEM$ got copied over! But my only problem is with VirtualBox is that I can't get the "install from CD" with RunOnceEX to work when not using the /INSTALL folder etc... LOL NVM... I love the stress :S Anyways, hope this might help... Would be nice if you let me know or some one else could clarrify this with the VMW/VB ? or have had a similar issue?