You might have a look here. Windows XP Setup Timeline I personally prefer to run my registry tweaks from cmdlines.txt: "REGEDIT /S regtweaks.reg" The advantage of this methode is that because you did not logon with any particulair account (afaik the default user account is active at this stage of setup) your tweaks will be applied to your default user and therefore will be applied to any new account. I Hope this makes something clear.