i was hoping not to get into a long and drawn out story but that seems to be what's necessary. i have 6 computers in my room here. i have a legally purchased windows xp professional disc for each system. because of the work that i do with these systems, (data recovery, software testing, etc.), i usually reinstall the os on each system multiple times a year and sometimes multiple times a month. the original discs no longer exist because they just didn't last that long before errors started to pop up. these discs are the third backups. that being said, when i do a reinstall with any of those discs on any of my systems, they all install fine and everything on these particular systems have a generic windows driver that works with it and is automatically installed during the reinstall. when the reinstall is complete, i would normally install xp-sp3 and then proceed to the windows update site for the remainder of the updates that came after sp3 was released. needless to say, a slipstreamed disc would make my life a great deal easier. when i ran nLite, these are the steps i went through: 01. place the windows xp install disc into the cd rom drive. 02. start nLite 03. browse and point to the cd rom drive and make a directory for the finished files to go to. 04. click next twice and then select service pack and bootable iso. 05. click next and select the sp3 file. 06. click ok, click next, click make iso. 07. click save and wait, click newt and click finish. 08. burn iso to a new cd. 09. use to install on other system. now when i do this, all the other generic drivers for the system install just fine, but no video driver installs and the the system defaults to 4 bit video. when i added the video driver to the slipstream, everything worked out fine. so my question is, why doesn't the video driver copy over with everything else? and also, as per "the finders" post above, why would it matter what i have on the host system if the files are being taken from the original disc?