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Actually, I think that I've seen my modular drive light flash a few times when I'm reinstalling Windows XP Home during the GUI Setup, so I think that I know what tha_inspecta is talking about. It's a Dell OEM CD.

Do you have the following sections in your winnt.sif? [Branding] BrandIEUsingUnattended = Yes [URL] Home_Page = http://www.mydomain.com/

0 days should work. That is, unless you want instantaneous results.

Well, I no longer work at that company so I don't have the resources to do much further testing. I'm working on my personal laptop that has been around for almost 2 years. I'm afraid that the hard drive will crash sooner than I think, so I'm trying to avoid hard drive intensive work at the moment. When I get back to university, I'll be able to do more. The only thing that I can think of is that I added a few applications with a GuiRunOnce batch file. There may have been some other tweaking along the way, like a new winntbbu.dl_ file and changing the default theme, but nothing big. I guess that it's harder than I thought to only have an Administrator account.

True, but that doesn't help you in the Save dialog. Not unless you select All Files in the drop down menu instead of Text Files. But if you do that, then it doesn't matter if extensions for known filetypes are hidden or not. If you use All Files, you won't need the quotes either.

If you plan on burning the ISO image to a CD, you'll have to remove some of those applications anyways. Might as well do that and re-edit your script at the same time.

Go to Start > Control Panel > Security Center. There is a link at the bottom of the list at the left hand side that says "Change Security Center settings" (you'll have to translate this). Uncheck all the check boxes and then click on OK.

You can do it either way. The GuiRunOnce section can accept multiple commands, or just one. It's usually better to use just one just in case something causes it to skip the other ones for whatever reason. If you need to track down what is and what is not installing, just use commands like: ECHO Now installing PROGRAM ... RUN INSTALLER ECHO PROGRAM installed. ECHO. ECHO Now installing PROGRAM 2 ... ; etc.

If you are using the integrated XP burning software, then do you click on Burn Disc after you copy those files to the CD? Or are you saying that after you select COPY TO HERE, you do not see the files in a section labelled "Files to be written to CD" or something like that?

Yeah, that's a real pain. Another thing that bugs me about IBM ThinkPad keyboards is the lack of a right-click key and how they don't put the Ctrl key in the very corner. Keyboards for the Gods: http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/77ba/ B)

Actually, I meant hardware like the RAM and processor. I'd try reseating all the hardware, just in case.

From my experience, this can also be related to bad hardware.

Try deleting the files in the Default User Profile and then adding new ones from the CD or something.

Really? Wow.

You can disable Windows Firewall notifications and then reenable them after the installation. There are command line commands that you can use to do this. You can also open ports. Alternatively, disable it in your unattended.txt. Use the ref.chm file from the Microsoft Deployment Tools (deploy.cab) to figure out how to do this.

You'll need to boot from a disc or something in order to get it started. I think that it's pretty easy to hide the drive in Windows Explorer. You can see it when you install Windows though. It's what most manufacturers are doing these days. They put a recovery image on the hard drive. The stupid thing is that this recovery image uses a different serial than the license on the bottom of the computer. Essentially, that manufactuer (IBM ThinkPads are good for this) just gave you two licenses for Windows XP for free.

Create a new account with Administrative credentials and make all the settings to it that you want. Log out and log in as Administrator. Then go to Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Settings (under User Profiles). Highlight the newly created account and click on Copy To. Under Add Names, put "Everyone" without the quotes and give this group full access. Save the profile to a folder. During the setup, copy all the files in this folder to the C:\Documents and Settings\Default User folder after clearing it out. Do not delete NTUSER.DAT or ntuser.dat.LOG. Now anyone that logs in should have the same settings as the new profile. I haven't tested this thoroughly, but it's possible that any new users that login may need Administrative credentials in order for the wallpaper to show up. It depends on where you put the wallpaper file.

RAR files in Gmail go through fine.

Since .exe's are executable, the possibility that the attachment contains malicious code is greater. Gmail, among many other e-mail programs/web e-mail services, block executables as a preventive measure. To send your attachment, rename the file to file.exe.a or something. Make sure that you're set to show extensions before changing the file name, otherwise it won't work. Once your friend receives the file, just ask them to rename it and remove the .a at the end.

Try putting Unattended.MST in the same folder as setup.exe and get rid of the quotes and the C:\ in the TRANSFORMS property. It also seems to work better if you use the SETUPSTD.MSI package with the TRANSFORMS property as opposed to setup.exe. Sometimes setup.exe doesn't always work as it'll use setup.ini files for its command line arguments.

Because there is an option to automatically login any number of times that you want.

Can you call over there and ask them to reset it? Also try using "password" as the password without the quotes.

Yes, but that's easy enough to do.

After I install Office 2003 Professional using an Administrative Installation Point, I am no longer able to update Office from that user's computer. The updates need to be pushed out in order for them to work. It says that "Detection shows that Office products on your computer have been updated by your Office product administrator from the administrative point on a server. This means that you should not update Office products yourself. If you are an Office product Administrator, please visit the Office Resource Kit for more information." Is there a setting in the transform file that I can use to change this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Do you have a [GuiRunOnce] section in winnt.sif? If so, are you using some sort of environment variable for the drive letter? A copy of your winnt.sif file would also be helpful.