Yes I also thought of tryin your suggestion out since sysprep didn't work for me currently, BUT when I first used this tutorial, it worked before hmm i can't put a finger on what happen now, after starting fresh. sysprep will load, finish or not, it will shutdown instead of restarting like it use to, i even used the autounattended.xml that worked before, its mind boggling, hope anyone can shed some light to this mysterious problem. Anyway I dump all that and add my programs in past 7 (FirstLogon) instead of the usual place at past 6 when sysprep was used, and it doesn't seem to work. I also remember using FirstLogon when sysprep was working, that time FirstLogon worked fine too. hmmmmmm i'm lost...