We have very different memories, then. The official docs were really good as far back as 2006 or so, they just required you to actually read them. Sysprep was c

We have very different memories, then. The official docs were really good as far back as 2006 or so, they just required you to actually read them. Sysprep was certainly a powerful tool, but if you told it not to generalize and no OoBE, it mostly just reset the SID. Most people I ran into who had issues were using some random poorly written blog posts that were really just content farming for ad money. Huh? I’ll grant you that Microsoft was picky about being paid for their software, but they produced a ton of tools to support cloning and duplicating. License compliance was handled with audits and CALs, not some weird cabal of anti-imaging.