Prevent Sysprep from overwriting Default User

[Gordon Fecyk]

XP Home SP2's Sysprep behaviour overwrites the contents of Default User with
that of the Owner account. Apparently, if there's no Owner account, it will
overwrite it with the contents of Administrator (default behaviour on XP
Pro).

I only want to make a handful of changes to the default user profile -
notably, minor config changes to IE's security zones and their settings, and
add a startup script to RunOnce to alter a new user profile's default ACL
(in an attempt to prevent unauthorized software).

So, my XP installation to get sysprepped doesn't have an Owner account (I
called it "Maintenance Admin") but I've run it once in Safe Mode to create
an Administrator profile. Sysprep appears to copy the contents of this
profile to Default User. Can I get away with editing the Administrator
profile with my default setting changes to have those take effect for new
users?

Or better still, could I replace ntuser.dat in Default User, or for that
matter the entire contents of Default User, with the one that has my changes
during a script launched from cmdlines.txt? Or perhaps I can replace
Default User's contents before making the image of this drive, but after
running Sysprep?

 

[Gordon Fecyk]

XP Home SP2's Sysprep behaviour overwrites the contents of Default User with
that of the Owner account. Apparently, if there's no Owner account, it will
overwrite it with the contents of Administrator (default behaviour on XP
Pro).

There's a hotfix described in KB887816 that changes this back to pre-SP2
behaviour. I've put in a support request for the hotfix.