FISHMANPET

One thing about using the unattend setup file and giving it a real product key rather than EVAL. If you do that, you'll need to add this to your configuration ini file: [SABranchOptions] SAActive=1 CurrentBranch=1 The official documentation on these is sort of confusing: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/understand/install-the-ltsb It implies that maybe those should go under [Options] rather than get their own section, and also has the name of the SAActive key incorrect (It's SSActive on that page, but the actual key is SAActive). But it does explain what the 1s and 0s mean for those two keys.

It turns out this has nothing to do with hotfixes, as the same thing happens when I build & capture then deploy an image with no hotfixes in the SCCM client.

So I've built and captured an image, and then deployed it to a client, but once deployed, the SCCM client won't properly download policies or anything. If I uninstall the SCCM client and reinstall it it works fine. Any idea what's going on/where I should look?

So I started deploying images to my clients with SCCM 2007 instead of building, to shorten the time to build a new machine. In the build and capture sequence I've deployed two hotfixes, KB977384 and KB2509007, the ones that allow running updates on an off domain machine, and the R3 hotfix. When I deploy the image, the SCCM client doesn't behave properly. On first boot it won't try and check in to the Site server, so I have to manually run an action on it, then the server sees it. Then I try and advertise a program to it, and it might tell the server that it wants to install the program, but it won't ever try. Updates don't work, etc etc. It's just a mess. The fix is for me to uninstall the SCCM client and reinstall it, and everything's fine. Deploying the image works perfectly, I set it to install updates after deploying the image to grab any that have come out since the image was made, and that always works fine. The fact that it's the client that acts up leads me to believe it's the "Setup Windows and ConfigMgr" step in either the build, deploy, or both that's causing the problem. There's no failures in the logs that I can see, and the task sequences finish without error. I've also found no mention online of how to deploy an image when hotfixes are involved, so I'm wondering if anybody has come across this and has solved it, or if you're able to successfully deploy an image with hotfixes involved.