I’m sorry to say that I have been working a lot with XP lately (the customers OS of choice). But at least I get to revisit those long forgotten parts of my brain, holding all the XP deployment info!
And as it turns out, some of the stuff in there seems to have just disappeared for good, which again makes is a greater opportunity to write down some of this stuff, should I ever get in this situation again.

In Windows 7 Components are called features, and can easily be added and removed using DISM, but XP tends to be more about inf, ini and txt files, so how is this done during deployment of a captured image, once you realize this can’t be done trough sysprep.inf (and just when you got used to everything being possible from the win7 unattend.xml).

SYSOCMGR.EXE to the rescue (read more about it HERE). It’s a native XP command line tool that can actually enable and disable components silently taking info from a txt file!

All you need to do is create a TXT file like this

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This will remove the IE express, Messenger and Media player shortcuts, as well as remove Internet games and MSN. A list of all the components you can change is found HERE

Now just ad the txt file to a package, and ad a run command line step to your TS (after “setup windows and ConfigMgr” step)

I have added the Components.txt to my custom scripts package, which has package ID CEN00165. The syntax of my command line then becomes:

cmd.exe /c sysocmgr.exe /i:C:\windows\inf\sysoc.inf /u:%_SMSTSCEN00165%Components.txt /q /r

Note: %_SMSTS + PackageID% will will resolve to the full UNC to the root of my custom scripts package

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Bonus info: If you want to remove the installation of Windows Media player all together. you can add this line to the txt file

Mplay = off            ; Install Windows media player