a fatal error occurred while trying to sysprep the machine

q: While running Sysprep.exe on a newly built desktop running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit we encountered this error:  "a fatal error occurred while trying to sysprep the machine"

Classy as always Microsoft with the overtly helpful error message.

We did quite a bit of searching on this one but not until we noticed these three lines in: setuperr.log did our search result in a solution.


2012-12-13 17:35:12, Error      [0x0f0082] SYSPRP LaunchDll:Failure occurred while executing 'drmv2clt.dll,Sysprep', returned error code -2147024864[gle=0x00000020]
2012-12-13 17:35:12, Error      [0x0f0070] SYSPRP RunExternalDlls:An error occurred while running registry sysprep DLLs, halting sysprep execution. dwRet = -2147024864[gle=0x00000020]
2012-12-13 17:35:12, Error      [0x0f00a8] SYSPRP WinMain:Hit failure while processing sysprep cleanup providers; hr = 0x80070020[gle=0x00000020]

a: We modified the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service in two ways then we re-ran sysprep.exe again and it worked.

1. Stop the Service
2. Set Startup type: Manual