cluberti

Localized versions of Windows XP will always install and run in the localized version before you can do anything. You can get the MUI for English, but you'll still have a percentage of the OS that's displayed in Spanish. Sorry I have to say this (since you don't want to hear it), but to get English to work 100% on your box from the get-go, you'll need to have an English XP CD .

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/13/

If you want traffic to flow reliably in both directions, and not just originating from the remote site, you'll need a site-to-site VPN. The ISP one may be good, but you'll have to determine whether or not you trust them enough with the backbone connecting your two sites. I'd say that, as someone who's done this many times in many ways, the site-to-site VPN via a PIX or ISA is the easiest and most reliable way to go.

I'm also puzzled - because your post is a complete run-on sentence. Dude, use some punctuation!

The article is at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;816299

The HAL type is determined by the setup routine querying the power management and ACPI/APM values in the BIOS upon boot (either from shadow ROM or direct query, depending on BIOS configuration). When I used to use Ghost, I had a 7MB partition up front on the drive (C:) that the system would boot to first - the admin chose the machine type from the menu, and the script would copy the correct hal.dll and driver set from the C: partition to the %windir%\System32 directory on the Windows partition (D:). It would then hide itself (using gdisk), and the system would reboot into Windows, convert the drive to NTFS and reboot, then continue with sysprep's version of mini-setup. This worked for YEARS, until the advent of SATA chipsets. After this, I couldn't get a sysprep image from a master machine to work on these SATA machines (not all, but most chipsets) when hardware detection was enabled in sysprep (and unfortunately, this was still necessary). I went to RIS to solve these problems about two years ago, and haven't looked back. If you're using RIS with flat image files, you won't have any need to do this. Windows setup will determine the proper HAL for your machine. If you plan on using riprep to do this, you won't even be able to do the sysprep hack I mention in my response to question 2, but I'd say riprep isn't a very good way of doing RIS - if you're going to use RIS, you should use flat files only. When Vista and Longhorn server are both out, you'll be able to use WDS and XImage natively to create and deploy OS images, but for now you're stuck with either sysprep+Ghost+HAL hack or RIS flat files to make what you want to do work properly.

The PIX is a great VPN/firewall, but also consider MS ISA 2004 if you've already got a domain, as these are bit more user-friendly (and you can even get preconfigured hardware devices from most vendors now too). I used to suggest PIX to everyone, but I've leaned almost 100% towards ISA for AD environments. It's worth looking into. And for your shared applications, terminal services would definitely be the way to go if bandwidth is an issue - all of the disk I/O and file access will be done from the terminal server, and the only thing going across the wire would be screen updates from the terminal server to the client. It sounds like you've got your work cut out for you - good luck.

No, this is a wierd answer file option, and doesn't work if it's added the way you think it would. If you provide the ProductKey vairable, it gets used but never shown. If you don't provide the ProductKey variable, install will always ask you to add it no matter what install level you choose. I've got a hunch this was added so that product keys were never shown during setup in case the admin made a mistake in the answer file setup, but it would be nice to have this value work like the rest. So to answer your question, there's no way to show the key in a modifyable form. You either have it blank, or provide a value in your unattend file and it doesn't get shown at all .

[GuiUnattended] AutoLogon = YES AutoLogonCount = x ; x= the number of times you want the machine to autologon Not sure why it would work on two and not the third, but if you can do it as admin and not a regular user, it's a permissions problem. As to where the permissions are screwed up I wouldn't be able to tell you without process auditing enabled, and it would be quicker to dump the box and reinstall again to see if the problem recurred.

Using the content advisor in the IE Tools > Options can set IE to only be able to view certain sites, and not able to view others. It's easily bypassed by someone who's good with Windows and the registry, but it's easy and free to setup. Otherwise, you'd need a proxy server external to the box to do this in a more secure manner.

1. Windows setup checks the floppy drive for the presence of a WINNT.SIF file. It will ALWAYS do this on the first boot. 2. Antivirus programs check the floppy drive to make sure you don't have a virus on a floppy - this was a method at one time for introducing boot-sector and BIOS-level viruses, and as such the check exists both on Windows start, and on Windows shutdown (whether or not you actually have a floppy, the software will check just in case, causing the delay). Floppy checks can usually be disabled in the program's configuration menus once installed.

No, the AlwaysUnloadDLL tweak does work, but it only works on unloading .dll's from memory. Since most .dll's are under 1MB in size, it's more for developer testing to make sure a .dll has unloaded once it's done being used rather than for actually freeing up large amounts of memory. Most people think that this tweak will magically free lots of memory, when in fact it will most likely not free ANY. The memory manager will still work the way it did before the tweak, it will just unload .dll's from memory - that memory address that the .dll held will most likely still be held by the memory manager for a time before it releases it back into the free pool, it's just the actual reference to the .dll in memory that is cleared. Read that book!

What does %windir%\windowsupdate.log say about the failures?

msiexec /i "%systemdrive%\apps\NAV\Symantec Antivirus.msi" REBOOT=ReallySuppress RUNLIVEUPDATE=0 ADDLOCAL=SAVMain,SAVUI,SAVHelp,EMailTools,OutlookSnapin,Pop3Smtp,QClient NETWORKTYPE=1 SERVERNAME=AVSERVER ENABLEAUTOPROTECT=1 /qb! Note that the above is all on one line - stupid word wrap. You'll need to modify the following fields for your environment: NETWORKTYPE=1/0, where 1 is managed and 0 is unmanaged (no SAV server on your network) SERVERNAME=AVSERVER, where AVSERVER is your internal SAV server's NetBIOS name (omit this field if you set networktype=0) You'll need to add this to a .cmd file that you call from [GuiRunOnce] - you can't call the installation directly because it's an .msi file. Instead, create a .cmd and call THAT from [GuiRunOnce], and place the above command in the .cmd file. That'll work just fine.

Hey, I didn't refresh the screen

Go into Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Startup and Recovery Settings button - there'll be a checkbox under "System failure" for "Automatically restart". Uncheck that, and the box won't automatically reboot.

Cool

Process auditing? It's in the GPO - Computer configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Audit Policy. Have fun, but make sure you have a good log rotation policy in place, because these will make your logs GROW .

Robocopy from the resource kit would work for something like this in a script. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...ee-b18c4790cffd It's a free download.

You are correct, just remove the runonce line and you should be good to go.

There are no ways to enable or disable system restore in the registry, only modify running settings (cache size, age of restore points, etc). Therefore, you must either learn VBScript to make these scripts, or, use something like AutoIT to script mouse clicks and keyboard presses and run it as a batch. There really isn't any other way to do what you're asking.

And a netmon of a connection from the client failing to the server says....

What's the actual bluescreen message, and what's the call stack? Uncheck the Automatically Reboot option and post the info here, and I can help.

No - at least not until after all of your drivers have been installed at around the T-28 stage, I think. You'd have to play around a bit after the "Installing Devices" step finishes.

Thanks . I didn't want to rewrite something that was already written so clearly. It was my hopes that people would click the link