Well-formed XML is not enough. Windows Setup validates against a schema and one
bad value invalidates the WHOLE answer file for its pass, so the machine stops at
a dialog with nothing configured and the only clue is an XPath buried in
C:\Windows\Panther\setupact.log.
On 2026-08-06 every shopfloor, standard and engineer build was failing exactly
that way:
/settings/RunSynchronous/RunSynchronousCommand/[Order="16"]/Path
Description = Value is invalid. hrResult = 0x80220005 pass = specialize
An inlined "powershell.exe -Command ..." had grown to 676 characters in a field
capped at 259, and had been broken since the previous evening. Every check here
is mechanical and would have caught it before a bay was booted:
path-too-long RunSynchronousCommand/Path > 259
cmdline-too-long SynchronousCommand/CommandLine > 1024
description-too-long Description > 256
duplicate-element a once-only element appearing twice
not-well-formed XML does not parse
bom UTF-8 BOM (the live files have none, and python's
utf-8-sig silently ADDS one when writing them back)
unknown-token %token% PESetup will not substitute; %WINDIR% and the
other shell variables are excluded or it cries wolf
Reads over SSH via base64 so a BOM or CRLF survives the hop unchanged. Exits
non-zero on any ERROR so it can gate a deploy.
Immediately found a second live defect the manual review had missed: a 329-char
Description on gea-engineer Order 11, which would have failed the oobeSystem pass
once specialize started passing. All three live image types and both repo copies
now lint clean.
