According to your step-by-step...

quote:
Uninstall all obvious hardware drivers
Empty trash
Defrag
Reboot
Image -------------------------------------------
Sysprep
If you reboot after the uninstall of drivers then PNP would put them back on reboot before the sysprep.

I found that on some images, I had to replace the ACPI HAL with a generic one and then set it back after.
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