No Windows 7 Aero theme for domain accounts, fine for local administrator account

[squatOn]

Hello! First time poster and also new to SCCM (2012) in general, but catching on pretty quickly. Much thanks to this forum.

 

A little back story - we created capture media so that we could capture a manually built reference machine (a virtual machine). This capture spit out what would be our new base WIM. It worked great. This base WIM is essentially Windows 7x64 Enterprise SP1, all up-to-date software updates, MS Office 2010, and Internet Explorer 10 only. We kept our base very simple.

 

The issue - We are running in to a very strange problem where we add our base WIM to our deployment task sequence, all seems great until you log in with a domain account. The Windows theme is some sort of "Windows Classic" or "Windows XP" theme. This does not happen for the local admin account though. So, you can log in as local admin, you get Windows 7 Aero theme. Log off, log in as a domain user and you get "Windows Classic/XP" theme (I've tried 4 domain user accounts to rule out the possibility of it being tied to a specific account). Log off and log back on as local admin and you get the Windows 7 Aero again. No idea what could be causing this. I thought it was possibly group policy because I was using a domain user account and maybe something was tied to it, but then I figured this would most likely happen to a lot of users in production and it isn't. I asked a friend and he said maybe look in to the unattend.xml, but I don't really know where to start with that. What could be in there that would be kicking off that classic theme look? This is especially weird when I am using a base WIM that I created from a Win7x64 Enterprise virtual machine that did have Aero turned on when it was captured.

 

I found the following article from TechNet, but this talks about when migrating from XP to Win7. We are going from Win7 to Win7...We are simply updating our Win7 image because our most recent version was created with poor practice. The base WIM has so many programs that not all users need installed on - essentially a fat image and it's no good. The article seemed very close to what my issue is, but I cannot undererstand it. I do not know what scanstate and loadstate are, nor a config.xml. Plus, since I am not coming from XP this probably won't fix my issue.

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/02/24/get-shiny-with-usmt-turning-the-aero-theme-on-during-xp-to-windows-7-migration.aspx

 

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[squatOn]

No responses yet, but I wanted to add that we are using MDT2013.

[kman-dk]

Take a look at this

 

http://www.autoitconsulting.com/site/deployment/windows-7-aero-theme-not-enabled-after-deployment/

 

/kman

[squatOn]

Take a look at this

 

http://www.autoitconsulting.com/site/deployment/windows-7-aero-theme-not-enabled-after-deployment/

 

/kman

 

Thank you! Worked like a gem. Much appreciated.