Reference: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/11/03/3291024.aspx I would tend to take Russinovich at his word too. The problem I see is the last paragraph: "The New Best Practice", which essentially reinforces "you should really run Sysprep or bad stuff will happen". This is the same mantra we've all been fed in MS documentation for years now, it just so happens that we've been using NewSID to sleep at night. NewSID was great because you could run it *in* Windows as opposed to Ghostwalker. Ghostwalker was great because you didn't have to suffer through Sysprep. Now we're back to Sysprep for relatively vague reasons. We use WSUS (as the only example given) without Sysprep and do not have any problems. Some light googling showed that it's likely a problem with duplicate WSUS client IDs. I queried our WSUS database for duplicates and didn't get any hits. Perhaps our procedures prevent the problem from happening, but it would be nice to have a document along the lines of "If you don't use sysprep, you have to do X for Y software or Z will happen" in very specific terms. Does anyone use Sysprep? Can anyone share experiences that have led them to use Sysprep? -Tony