If you want your registry settings and ini files to carry over you have to set CopyProfile to true in your autounattend.xml <settings pass="specialize"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <CopyProfile>true</CopyProfile> </component> </settings> Dont go too crazy with your software preinstall, I stick to the basics: directx, dotnet4, office2k10, silverlight, vcruntimes, waik+sup+docs, mssceces, playready, wlm, msxml4, orca, wudt, acroreadr, jre, flash, shockwave, 7zip, skype, nvidia physx, and thats pretty much what I install along with a few shell extension tools and regtweaks I only had a problem with one program and that was Win7codecs (BTW thanks for reporting your experience with PerfectDisk, I was just thinking of including it)