jamieo

No, I don't think so. My issue relates only to unattend.xml - Removal using the 'Turn Windows features on or off' UI works as expected.

I've only been affected by one new issue in this release (autounattend.xml) while two have been resolved... (not to mention the boatload of new features added) ...we're getting closer to the dream! Issues Resolved in vLite 1.1 Beta: Hold'em Help now fixed! Bluetooth Modem Driver now kept

If there is a hotfix installation still pending, either though WU on the host system or an aborted integration into a mounted wim, then most attempts to integrate further hotfixes will fail. Therefore, it is recommended to reboot before integrating in this case. Perhaps there is some way for vLite to detect when there is a pending hotfix and then recommend a reboot? @nuhi: Does vLite not alert the user when a hotfix fails? If not then it might help to know that pkgmgr returns a non-zero errorlevel if the hotfix failed.

The msi installer has detected some change in the installation of an office 2003 component which appears to be used by IE. It tries to fix it but cannot (possibly the installation source is no longer available) so this happens every time that component is loaded. I had a similar situation and found the change it didn't like was the 'My Documents' folder being moved!

Might be worth adding the option to remove previously integrated hotfixes as I have done manually with pkgmgr in similar situations. The commandline is almost exactly the same, just switch '/ip' for '/up' Although I recommend starting with a fresh image of course...

Is this to recover the entire driver set for all models of that manufacturer? I've already tried to recover just the files for a particular model so I'd be interested in any tips you have for that. The only way I came up with is to install full vista and they use a driver backup utility of some kind.

No problem. As to whether it will actually fix it...

That one only seems to apply to using 'Eject' from within Explorer. I found KB931619 though which sounds promising... When you click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in Windows Vista, the device in question may not be removed as expected

A lot of manufacturers refer you to the included Vista drivers. I am currently using the last XP driver for my Epson (pre-vista) printer and would also like to know how to utilise drivers from the original installation source (as you could do in XP). Jamie

Toshiba M30X Notebook Pentium M 735 Intel i855 Motherboard 1GB RAM Only thing in common seems to be Intel Centrino based Notebooks. Do you have the foloowing USB controller: Intel® 82801DB/DBM USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller - 24CD

As we seem to be alone with this problem I wonder what hardware you have that is similar to mine?

I agree with the OP - in XP SP2 everything worked great: one left click in the tray, then click the menu item and a little balloon tells you it's done. No need to confirm the balloon tip, it just goes away on it's own. Now, in Vista it is very unreliable and fails a lot of the time for no reason* - additionally, they have also added the abilty to right click the drive in explorer and choose to safely remove from there. Great! However, the option has disappeared most of the time and the single left click on the tray icon now reults in a msgbox instead of a balloon so you have to acknowledge the fact that it actually worked. *I've found the use of vLite to remove 'Windows Portable Devices' improves greatly the reliability of 'Safely Remove'. However, some may need that service for cameras etc.. Also, the right click item in explorer can be restored (most of the time) by restarting explorer. I really hope SP1 puts this right - even if it just restores the functionality and reliability that XP SP2 had. Although, if they got the explorer bit working too that'd be nice.

Ooh.. sounds promising, I hope you succeed as you know I've been wanting this for a while.

Issues Resolved in vLite 1.0 Final: Cannot 'safely remove' my USB HDD anymore The addition of the Portable Devices component resolves this issue with Vista. Game Explorer nuhi has done his best with this component to maintain compatibilty Internet Connection Sharing Windows Firewall is still dependent on ICS but that fact is now listed in vLite

The reg setting I've been applying since the early builds of vLite should help - I remove WinSAT and glass is always enabled for me without restarting DWM or other such intervention. ;------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ; Enable Glass Aero Theme ;------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM] "Composition"=dword:00000001 "CompositionPolicy"=dword:00000002 Edit: I just reinstalled without the above tweak and can confirm it's responsible for activating glass aero - perhaps nuhi could add this to the existing glass tweak in vLite?

Vista setup has a very nice interface to make all those partitions and once done you won't have to configure them again. Additionally you can configure unattend.xml to reformat and install vista to the target partition. ..however, while it makes sense to keep the OS separate from everything else (so your documents, installers etc. will be safe during reinstallation) I do not recommend you make so many partitions. I had a similar setup to what you propose and used to partition os1/os2/documents/storage/ghost. What I found is that you'll quickly find one partition is too small while the others have lots of space free which is essentially wasted - this is especially the case with laptop drives and cannot really be avoided as you are essentially partitioning the available free space. Also, remember that there is really no performance benefit to moving page files, temp folders etc, to a separate partition on the same drive. In my case I had plenty of free space left on my documents and ghost partitions but ran out of space on my storage partition. I changed the sizes around a couple of times but then you just end up running out of space on a different partition. Therefore, I have merged my documents, storage and ghost partitions into one and made a small fat32 dos partition (~180MB) just so I can into boot dos and use ghost etc. (which can write it's images to the ntfs storage partition). By consolidating all the unused free space into one partition I was able to increase the size of my previously full 50GB storage partition to 75GB with a final gain of over 15GB in free space after copying the contents of the other partitions to it. If you are using unattend.xml I can post the xml to reformat and install vista to particular partition. I wouldn't recommend getting setup to configure all the partitions automatically though (unless you are going into mass production!) as it's a one time thing and I prefer not to take the risk of vista wiping all my stuff!

Are you trying to activate Vista Basic with an Ultimate key? While it's no loss for M$ I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't possible.

Possibly Collaboration. I found that broke some netsh functionality but it's fixed now. Edit: oops, didn't see your post there nuhi. I just searched for that file in the original wim and it ain't there...

(Had to test this...) I exported two ultimate images from the original source wim and tried applying hotfixes before and after vLite. The hotfixes I applied were all the system updates (no languages etc) offered from Windows Update for the vLited image except for MRT. I also added Hold 'em, XPS Standalone Viewer, HLP viewer and WUSA update. Size increase from applying hotfixes 2,163,015,542 Original Vista Ultimate 2,218,518,208 Ultimate + hotfixes ------------- 55,502,666 = 52.93 MB ------------- 565,244,937 vLited Ultimate Image 623,685,049 vLited + hotfixes ------------- 58,440,112 = 55.73 MB ------------- Notice above, the size increase gained by applying hotfixes to the vLited image is almost 3MB greater than from applying to the original image - which seems to indicate that some of the difference shown below is due to replacing files that have just been removed by vLite. Size difference of each final image 623,685,049 Ultimate -> vLite -> hotfixes 617,390,695 Ultimate -> hotfixes -> vLite ------------- 6,294,354 = 6.00 MB (11.34% of original hotfix increase) ------------- Not a huge difference but enough to show that vLite is doing some nice cleaning up after applying hotfixes.

I can definitely see an advantage for say, adding WMP hotfixes when you only keep the codecs - that way any extra files for the player get removed too. So vLite officially supports this method then? I really didn't expect vLite to account for the differences that future hotfixes may introduce - although now I think about it, that information will be recorded in the installation and I guess vLite reads that info just as it does for a regular installation to find out what components are available... Hmm... I'll have to try this as I'm interested to see what space savings can be gained with this method. I look forward to seeing this fix in the changelog as I'm sure there are others who did not realise this was supported. Jamie

I'm surprised (but kind of impressed?) that nuhi would even try to support removal with vLite after hotfix integration. I never considered updating before removal but there are so many variables that I prefer to update after anyway. You would want nLite/vLite to support service packs (when they come out) so you can update your installation source once and use that image over and over in vLite. With hotfixes, they come out so often that you would probably update the hotfixes more than the vLite image! ...once nuhi stops adding new features to vLite anyway Therefore, I keep the output from vLite safe* and integrate hotfixes into a copy of that image. When scripted it's no hassle and takes less than 10 minutes. *I actually have the original image stored in the same wim as the hotfixed image. This way it takes up virtually no space as it only adds ~15MB to the size of the wim.

Updated first post to reflect changes for 1.0 RC. Removed issues that have been resolved - many thanks to nuhi. Issues Resolved in vLite 1.0 RC: Removal of Help vLite forces removal of the Start Menu's Help item. Last Session_u.ini Only cosmetic but it would be nice if this file wasn't written to the disc when the unattended page wasn't used. 13MB - Performance Counters SQL Server 2005 will not install with this component removed. 10MB - Collaboration netsh dependent on a dll from this component. Internet Explorer Script errors in some apps that use the html engine (ie, chm help) when IE is removed but html engine is kept. 6MB - Volume Shadow Copies Previous Versions tab remains after removal of shadow copies and system restore 1MB - PhotoScreensaver.scr The screensaver component leaves this one behind. 5MB - %PUBLIC%\Pictures\Sample Pictures No component (inc. Wallpaper) currently removes these. 3MB - MSN Installer No component (not even IE) currently removes this installer from %ProgramFiles%\MSN, I always delete it. 75MB - Setup files from installation DVD There's another 75MB that can be removed if you always plan to boot from the dvd to install vista as the files are duplicated within boot.wim

I don't have an answer but I don't have the problem either and I remove the same components as you except I keep: Windows Firewall, Secondary Logon, Computer Browser, and Remote Desktop. Perhaps it's one of the first two or three but it seems unlikely?

I had this working and noticed the script uses netsh to let RDP through the firewall. If you've removed Collaboration with the current releases of vLite then that call will fail. If you have kept collaboration then it may be the call doesn't work on home premium as there is no rule defined. To workaround these problems you have to define the rule yourself, either manually or by importing from a reg file. If you import a rule that you want enabled then a restart of the firewall service will be required. It's a little more than that legally. Atm, vLite removes functionality you've paid for so vLite is pretty safe from the m$ lawyers. You're requesting it to add functionality you haven't paid for and is reserved to market more expensive editions of windows. If m$ wanted to come after vLite then it's this kind of thing that ensures they will. Just edit the batch file a little so it'll work unattended then run it from somewhere during setup. Jamie

Application Experience is a component you can remove using vLite. It appears not to be needed if you use recent software but atm some stuff you'll expect to work (which registers ocx, tlb files etc.) will not - I hope that'll change in the future. So, nuhi's saying it's best to keep it.