I've done a fresh install of Home and Pro in the past couple of months. There is no requirement to use a Microsoft account if there is no network connection.

I've done a fresh install of Home and Pro in the past couple of months. There is no requirement to use a Microsoft account if there is no network connection. I also did a fair amount of configuration before connecting to the network, and a lot of the third-party apps that typically get installed alongside Windows were not installed. The end product was nice, but jumping through the hoops to get there was a pain. It's also rather annoying that I cannot figure out which particular setting(s) prevented the installation of third-party apps.