I recently created a win7pese build (x64 for the moment soon to be followed up by x86 (making a multi-boot repair/instalation/multimedia(personal quirk I like my technical tools to be fun too) drive.)
anyway the build in winbuild went pretty much flawlessly and well testing it in vmware I decided I would copy,had planned to extract but imagex was not playing nice for unknown reasons, but I copied the "target" folder contents to a removable HDD then into VMware and manually tweaked the BCD so the thing would boot. This is so I could install a few extra programs and tweak a few things from with in the PE environment and have them persist then rebuild it ramdisk style.
Again everything here seemed to go flawlessly, However on reboot to test persistence, some things that get registered (eg. codecs from combind community codec pack (cccp), or the networking tool Hamachi) dont work. the files are still there and a reinstall from the installer (confirming to overwrite as needed) will make whatever it is work again until the next reboot where its the same story again.
Other details I care less about but the perfectionist in me would like to fix...
all icons on the desktop except "computer" and "recycle bin" used to have icons and in the property menus still do but on the desktop they are just a black square.
Icons pinned to start menu/bar get a (2) (3) (4) (and so on) upon every reboot unless I go to the user pinned folder and delete all the .lnk shorcuts there but then they just start over again.
Extra details that maybe important..
Aero of course wont work in vmware but the PE is setup to enable admin account and switch to it right after penetworking does its thing so on a capable computer it would hopefully jumpstart aero.
without premade scripts I am not skilled enough yet to take some random installer and install to an offline system, copying files is easy enough, but figureing out what it writes to the regestry, or what other files and settings it fiddles with is where I get lost. Hence my attempt to boot in and install from inside.
if anyone has some advice on fixing the regestry persistance issue, the weird icon and/or renaming issue it would be greatly appriciated.