Please forgive the ignorance! I was given an non-bootble WINPE 1.1 for ISV's December 2002 cd - which I was told by Microsoft is the latest version?

PROBLEM! I created a bootable cd following the help of an xp_sp1a image and winpe ...the cd starts, loads windows pe, ... a desktop of a greeh hill appears and it reboots. I have no logs; no nothing. Should this not boot me into a winpe environment?

Any help is appreciated;

Version 1.2 of WinPE was available to volume licensing customers as of June 2003. Could've been available sooner, but I believe the versioning is:

WinXP RTM --> WinPE 1.0 release

WinXP SP1 --> WinPE 1.1 release

Win2003 --> WinPE 1.2 release

and there will be a new version coming out whenever WinXP SP2 goes gold.

That aside, MS WinPE should be launching STARTNET.CMD as the default shell, which echoes some "obey the EULA" text at you and stops at an open CMD prompt. This is controlled by the registry value

HKLM\System\Setup\CmdLine REG_SZ "Whatever you want to launch"

If your default shell is a CMD file, closing that file will shutdown/reboot MS WinPE. So check your value for this reg entry, and if it's STARTNET.CMD, verify that STARTNET.CMD exists. This should be a step in the right direction.

-syrynxx