WALKINDAKAT, I said earlier that mine were different but I looked again and they are the same. How are you checking your AutoUnattend.xml? I am using Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) and it is what changed my plain text keys to these funny looking sequences of upper/lower case letters with an = at the end. My Administrator PW does not have an = at the end. In the .xml you posted, the PWs are the same. The only difference I can see in what you are doing is that I do not have a <Domain></Domain> in either my account definition or auto logon. Don't know if this s a possible problem. Enjoy, John. Hiya Basically I decided to recreate my file from scratch in WSIM for Windows 7 but used all the same settings but didn't add any local accounts. As I am in a test environment with test passwords I also unticked Tools- unhide secure information to see if this helped It seems to have worked and I'll post the complete unattend file here tomorrow minus any sensitive info as it works really well now