RogueSpear

If it works with just the Update Pack, smart money would bet that one of the addons is causing your problems. If it were me personally, I would start with eliminating the patch addons. I have no idea what XPRAID patch addon is, but it's raising some red flags in my mind. Are you building each image using a fresh source?

I just got into VB starting with the 2005 version, so I can't be of that much assistance here, but perhaps you could translate what I wrote to work with VB6. Granted it's relying on a .NET feature, but I'm wondering if you could more or less replace the .NET stuff with the .dll file you want to use. I'm running that function against 100MB+ files just as fast as HashTab does it.

Perhaps your source is corrupt ?

I would start out just using the RVM Integrator and see if it works. If it does, then nLite, and so on. Once you nail down the step that screws everything up, we could more easily help from there.

I think that the option simply turns off the power to the NIC if there is no live wire plugged in. So long as your server is plugged in to the network you should be fine. I always disable the option myself with the idea that perhaps it would be just one less thing that the OS would have to keep track of. It's one less thing to go wrong. It probably has no real benefit at all, but it makes me feel better It's probably is crossover code that spans multiple versions of Windows and has it's roots in portable computers. My wife's laptop for instance has both a built in Intel Pro 100 and a Broadcom 802.11b/g adapter. Most of the time she is connected via wireless, so why power the NIC? Going along those lines, I know plenty of people who run Windows 2003 Server as their main desktop OS for a variety of reasons. So they probably appreciate having the feature available to them as well.

Microsoft's provided tools for printers management really suck to say the least. After messing around for quite a while, I finally made a common VBscript that is called from individual OU scripts. The common script essentially is one huge case select that calls various subroutines. It isn't elegant or pretty, but it works. The per machine printer has never been reliable for me.

I don't know if you have any restrictions that are keeping you from upgrading from VB6 or not, but I posted a function in the sticky thread in this forum for generating MD5 sums on files. It leverages the built-in functionality provided by .NET. And it really doesn't matter what the file size is either.

Excellent catch. I can't believe I didn't see that in the previous posts myself.

Well aren't we lucky to a have such a philanthropic soul such as yourself If you want to sell your ignorant opinions and propaganda, I doubt you'll find many buyers around here. The only reason someone would gush with half truths and lies regarding the merits of copy protection is because they profit from it. Your argument sounds just about as genuine to me as the one Microsoft tries to make for it's "Benefits of being genuine".

You obviously speak as someone with an agenda and your claim that there is even such a thing as "effective" copy protection clearly illustrates your own ignorance. So what is your hidden agenda? A little bit of disclosure would be helpful.

Update - 20060802 Updated Paint.NET to V2.70 Updated QuickTime Alternative to V1.73

That's similar to process required for installing .NET 2.0 from svcpack.inf. I would use it sparingly. I've seen some spectacular failures when something goes wrong with that little reg hack.

And before too long you've almost doubled the size of your code, possibly introduced multiple bugs, slowed the whole thing down, etc. I've managed to find open source and / or free software for just about anything out there. For the very few titles that I have found worth purchasing, they all share a couple of common characteristics. They are fairly priced and they don't have any excessively rude or intrusive copy protection. Dameware NT Utilities is a perfect example of this. It's outstanding software that works better than it's competition which all cost double or triple depending on volume. And their support is outstanding to boot. I think in the end if you make a good product and don't attempt to gouge your customers, you won't have to get Machiavellian with your copy protection.

I never really designed AutoRIS or AutoImage to work with 2K3. AutoImage has a lot of the framework in place, but it's certainly not ready or tested when it comes to server operating systems.

There is more than likely a custom action that you could eliminate from the .msi file. I do all of my work with .msi files using AdminStudio, but if you don't have access to that (it's stupid expensive) I believe Orca could do that just as well.

Well it does suck and it's why I always make sure that the computers I buy for clients come with no license at all. Unfortunately this leaves out a lot of vendors because many will not sell a computer without a license or if they do, it's the same price anyway. After so many years of dealing with this crap, I have nearly the same degree of contempt for Microsoft as I have for oil companies, lawyers, and child molesters.

Update - 20060801 Updated FFDShow Decoder to 20060522 Updated ieSpell to V2.3.0 Build 264 Updated Microsoft ActiveSync to V4.2 Updated QuickTime Alternative to V1.72 Updated SyncBack to V3.2.12

Amen..

I've never had anything but grief with RIPrep which is why I've never supported it. It's complete rubbish.

Interesting. I use WSUS as well and I've specifically been keeping the notifications thing from installing because of some false positives and other issues that Microsoft give me an explanation for. This was prior to build 540, but now I will never knowingly let that POS install within my organization if I can help it. Looks like I need to go check my syslog.

Create the appropriate OU's and use GPO's at the OU level to put domain level security groups into the local groups. I do this with the executive level employees. That way they're admin level for all executive computers.. in other words they can screw up their own computer or other executive computers - but nobody else's.

If you take a 100Mb connection, you can count on about 1/3 to 1/2 of that being consumed by protocols and error correction alone.

I don't really see anything that stands out in the batch file, but then again I'm more of a VB guy than batch. Perhaps one of MSFN's resident batch experts will take a look and see something.

If you're copying over everything via $OEM$\$1, then it all get copied during the text mode portion of setup. So it's there long before. This is why I was interested in the batch file. If it's working when run manually, but from RunOnceEx, I figured there may be something of interest to look at. If there's anything sensitive in the batch file, just XXXX all of that out if you'd like to post it.

Well I don't see anything immediately that's wrong with your batch file setting the ROE entries. The only thing I can really think of is that something is not being found. One troubleshooting suggestion for circumstances like this is to verify your target exists. Try inserting an IF EXIST in there to see if "%systemdrive%\SanKit\5.26\InstallScript\sanupdate.bat is found by the batch file.