During one of Windows 2008 and Windows 7 deployment projects I've seen an error "Could not process or parse the answer file for [specialize] pass. Please restart."

After hours of investigations I managed to find a solution, and now I'd like to let you know what to do. Here are steps:

1. Press Shift+F10 when you get "Windows could not parse or process unattend answer file"
2. Navigate to the the directories C:\Windows\Panther and C:\Windows\Panther\UnattendGC and review a log files. In one of the logs I've seen the following error:

"Execution of unattend GCs failed; hr = 0x0; pResults->hrResult = 0x8030000b"

To make a long story short, I'd like to say that the problem is an account / user profile that was deleted improperly.

In my case, before running a sysprep.exe few temp users were deleted from the system and looks like this process didn't go well. When I prepare a system for SYSPREP, I'm deleting all unneccesary users and deleting unneeded user profiles (Advance system settings --> Advanve --> User Profiles --> Settings). So, when we delete a users / profiles we should be sure that those user's profile disapear from a profiles folder C:\Users\.

And now the important trick!

We have to open a registry and navigate to the: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
We will see few Keys there, something like: S-1-5-18, S-1-5-19,....and S-1-5-21-2584366351-3777253184-1023139299-500

In my case key S-1-5-21-2584366351-3777253184-1023139299-500 contains all information about user Administrator (It's easy for verify to what user referees this key. Simply take a look on a "ProfileImagePath" value. In my case, it's C:\Users\Administrator ). If you have more active profiles you will see more keys like S-1-5-21-2584366351-3777253184-1023139299-500.

It's very important to remove all unnecessary profile from here. Just keep the system profiles (short keys like S-1-5-18 and S-1-5-19) and profiles for users who should have to be on the system.

Now, when a system was "cleaned" in a right way, we can execute sysprep.exe with all necessary parameter.

I hope this informative for you :). Have an easy SYSPREP-ing :).