I'm a complete novice with MDT 2012, but I have had pretty good luck getting a deployment for Server 2008 R2.
I have a reference system, and I do a very vanilla sysprep and capture using the template task sequence with no changes.
My deployment has a few app installs and other configuration items, but nothing too exotic.
My problem is this: during deployment, after applying the system from WinPE, I perform the final reboot. At this point, the expected action is for an autologon to take place, and for the local Administrator account to run c:\Litetouch.vbs, which does some final cleanup and a few tasks that require the target system to be running.
This isn't happening on my system. And a look at the registry shows that the autologon stuff has not been set up, so it won't ever happen. It's not a matter of having an incorrect account, or a count of 0, none of the autologon registry keys are even present.
In trying to solve this (I believe it worked when I first started!) I've stripped down my deployment to a pair of task sequences that have no customization at all in either the capture or the deployment task sequences, and still no luck. So I believe that something has changed in my reference system – but I unfortunately can't roll back.
What is driving me a little nuts is that I can't tell when that autologon information is supposed to be inserted in the registry. There is code in Litetouch.wsf that appears to do it, in function PopulateAutoAdminLogon, but I can't come up with a scenario in which this function gets called. I am guessing that perhaps sysprep does it when creating the WIM, but I can't seem to find good information on that.
I've done a lot of searching on this, and unfortunately the answer space is cluttered with people who have a similar sounding but completely different problem – they want their deployed system to do an autologon, and after deployment their system comes up with the logon screen instead of doing what they want. I've seen a few people post similar problems to mine, but nobody has received an answer.
So in a nutshell: when deploying a system using MDT 2012, at what point do the autologon items from unattend.xml stuffed into the registry for use after state restore/reboot in the task sequence? And what can go wrong with that?
Best Answer
My problem was being caused by a sysprep failure - the rearm count on my image had quietly bounced up to 2 due to carelessness.
What's strange is that such a huge failure in the process generated no obvious red flags. I really had to dig to find the problem. The sysprep failure cascaded into a dozen other problems that were all red herrings. Working my way backwards finally gave up the answer.