Ghost Solution Suite

I have an image with Windows Vista Enterprise x86 SP2. I'm using Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 to deploy it out to campus computer labs. Since one of the labs has different hardware than my reference system, I'm using the DeployAnywhere feature in GSS. As part of the process, it runs Sysprep against my image after it has been deployed to the lab PCs.

If I have Internet Explorer 7 on the image, everything runs fine. My image gets rolled, Sysprepped, and sits at the login prompt nicely when its all done.

With IE 8 installed, it's a completely different story. The image gets modified so it runs fine on the hardware, but judging from the logs it looks like I have some problems when it tries running sysprep /oobe near the end of the process. Under C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\Panther, I get an IE folder with additional logs not there otherwise althought it doesn't note any specific errors there. In the C:\Windows\Panther\UnattendGC\setupact.log, it starts throwing messages afterwards saying that it can't use unattend.xml becauase the parts have already been processed. When everything seems to be done (at least Ghost thinks it is), I end up with a PC logged in to the Administrator account (which should be disabled) and sitting with the Sysprep.exe GUI window open.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? I'd like to go to IE 8 but I've been pulling my hair out trying to track down the source of this problem over the last couple days. It was finally just earlier this evening that I realized IE 8 was the root cause.

Thanks in advance.

So the suspected root of the problem is that IE 8 is changing the way that the xml files are working?

I wasn't able to figure out entirely what was going on.  It seemed more like something was happening when Sysprep tried running the IE cleanup DLL calls that failed and left the process in a bad state, but that's just conjecture.  The sysprep.exe file is still exactly the same in SP2 with IE 8 as it was in SP1 with IE 7, so I don't think it is an issue with the format or layout of the XML file.

There may not be anything wrong, necessarily, with the format of the xml file itself but rather with the interpreter of the xml file as might be the case with the new IE.  I'm thinking there might be a possibility that either there were planned changes in IE8 that affected something in the way that this xml file runs by some tertiary effect (hence the addition of a compatibility mode for end users) or that something in the installation of IE8 is somehow corrupted on the source machine.

I don't know if this would affect sysprep at all but you could try setting Firefox as the default XML file program before taking up the image to see if that makes any difference.  You could also try uninstalling and reinstalling IE8 and then pulling the image again.

I reinstalled IE 8 several times to no effect.  It is actually Sysprep parsing the XML file, so what browser is installed as the default should have no impact.  Changing the default browser would only affect what browser opens when I double-click on the XML file.

There is a DLL in Internet Explorer that Sysprep interacts with to perform a cleanup during the installation process.  It does stuff like emptying the cache and clearing the history by calling backend DLL functions in the IE core.  At this point, I'm reasonably certain that there is something going wrong with this DLL itself or the backend DLL functions it calls.