Microsoft releases Windows XP SP3 to manufacturing

Can it be slipstreamed? Would make helping out the friends and family that want to downgrade from Vista. Does it have any new drivers? Going the F6 USB FLoppy drive, driver route for new Intel IH8 SATA chipsets on notebooks blows when downgrading to XP.

^ Caus' that's where the buzz's at on tech sites... even Winsupersite !

Thanks Hastin, it would not have shocked me if MS did something to block the slipstream.

"Erm, your link goes to the Technet Forums" Erm, it did say it would: "For further information regarding Windows XP SP3 RTM, please visit the TechNet Forum blog post...." - Microsoft via Paul @rseiler: Blacklisted VLM's are being blocked through the slipstreaming of SP3 onto SP1 media. As for the commenter on the forum, I suspect it has something to do with their particular product key, as I was able to slipstream the RC and have it accept my Action Pack VL product key without any problem. Common blacklisted VLK's such as the [in]famous "FCKGW" key STILL don't work as expected. FYI: I used an SP2 slipstreamed VL copy of XP Pro, as was included in the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription from a couple years back (the orange CD's, not the older blue ones). I dumped the CD contents to a folder, used the /integrate option as usual, burned it as a bootable CD, and installed it by booting off the CD without any kind of unattended installation script or what-have-you. Everything went swimmingly, product key included. Online validation worked fine too, since I was able to download Windows Defender from the Microsoft Download Center. "Going the F6 USB FLoppy drive, driver route for new Intel ICH8 [sic] SATA chipsets on notebooks blows when downgrading to XP." You can integrate drivers from an installation point using corporate deployment options (Microsoft Deployment, the new version of BDD 2007), or using a custom Windows PE configuration. As a note, most notebook versions of the ICH8 chipset don't actually support RAID, and most notebooks don't come with SATA2 drives, so AHCI is also not of any benefit, even if it is there. Many manufacturers lock the BIOS options for the ICH8 in IDE mode, and you don't need drivers for that. If your notebook does, the only way to inject drivers is via the methods above, or via an F6 floppy. This is leftover stuff that was picked up from previous versions of Windows, similar to Windows 2000. Windows Vista doesn't suffer from such legacy code, now that Windows Setup is completely revamped.

"I know, it's weird, but do it in Vista, and XP SP3 will not accept your valid VLK when you're installing XP." Why would anyone do that anyway??? The setup program calls setup API's from the currently installed Windows version FIRST, before using its internal setup mechanism. I did it in a Windows PE version built on Windows Server 2003 R2, where there is no Windows Setup API's loaded as part of the OS, and it worked fine (Windows Server 2003 has the same basic kernel as Windows XP).

"This particular problem seems to be a bug involving the pidgen.dll file" Actually, it's not with that particular file - it's with the API calls that reference it. An installed Windows OS will be "found" first, before the included pidgen.dll is.