My dear alacrán, a misunderstanding again, this time on my part. it is not that I do not use the original isos as u and wimb indicated, I have been using and testing them for the past couple of weeks. the impression u get is due to my post-debloat and post-reduce attempts to "keep everytning together" working as usual, which leads me to add the dlls proper of any of my favorite apps that would not work otherwise. this of course alters the originality of the vhd as u conceive of it. among these files there might be one or some that services.msc relies on in order to work. and this possibility can be extended to who knows how many other cases - in my opinion, this is where the confusion lies. anyway, i'll try and do as u say, and keep a copy of a fresh debloated and reduced original for testing. i will also have to use the fresh editions of windebloat and winreduce, as everytime one comes in I always "amend" it with my scripts (still with the same intent as above only). from now on I will try the fresh editions without cnanges or additions.
Wrong.
You have to make a fresh installed 10x64 2004 VHD, but WITHOUT apply Win_Debloat and Win_Reduce. And create a base WIM file of it. (10x64-Base.wim)
Latter you install that base WIM file into a new LZX compacted VHD (10-Test.vhd), and you make a copy of it (10-Test - copy.vhd), and you run the new versions of Win_Debloat and Win_Reduce (on 10-Test.vhd) to check how it works. And every new Win_Debloat and Win_Reduce release, just delete 10-Test.vhd, and make a new copy of 10-Test - copy.vhd and rename it to 10-Test.vhd, where you will run this new released versions of Win_Debloat and Win_Reduce, this way you are always running your test in a fresh just installed version.
I suggest to Keep Win_Debloat as it is released, but in Win_Reduce you can edit the Custom_Command.cmd and add only the two lines related to XXX user, and keep this CMD file to copy to every new version of Win_Reduce, until a future new updated version of that file becomes available.
This way all our test will be consistent and we will be able to reproduce each other findings.
And for now I suggest you keep your VHD used for every day tasks, to your last known good version, and don't introduce changes to it inmediatelly, better wait some reasonable time until all this new and possible future changes and features added are fully tested and confirmed to work fine in all of our 3 scenarios (yours, wimb's and mine), maybe twice a year is a good time as Win updates.
Of course if you are interested in testing also Win11 you can do same thing.
alacran