Out of Office Hours

In preparation for an MMSMOA 2025 session where I am talking about the Autopilot Branding package (among other things), I figured it was a good time to look through the feedback, issues, and pull requests and create a new release. The initial 3.0 release was published a couple of weeks ago, and after a couple of additional rounds of bug fixes and tweaks, I think it’s now ready to go.

You can find the latest version here:

https://github.com/mtniehaus/AutopilotBranding/releases

The release notes provide a good summary of what’s changed, but I’ll expand on that a little:

• Added logic to skip the first sign-in animation and the “Preparing Windows…” screen that appears instead. See https://oofhours.com/2025/05/02/whats-really-happening-on-first-user-logon/ for more information. (It’s nice to see that the first logon stuff keeps getting faster — it took forever on the first Windows 10 releases, but it’s pretty quick on Windows 11 24H2, especially after you remove a bunch of in-box apps.)
• Added logic to turn off the Widgets button on the task bar. This proved to be particularly challenging due to the new UCPD driver that was added in Windows 11 24H2 (and potentially other releases via Windows Update), which block updates to some registry values. The workaround, which I talk about in my post at https://oofhours.com/2025/05/02/what-is-windows-11s-new-ucpd-feature/, is quite funny.
• Added logic to completely remove the Widgets feature (not just hiding it where a user could choose to put it back, but removing it), as an option.
• Added logic to update NuGet and WinGet when required. (There are cases when the WinGet update doesn’t work due to failures running the Repair-WinGetPackageManager as LocalSystem, but that’s generally OK as WinGet is functioning on newer OSes anyway.)
• Fixed the OneDrive machine-wide installer logic to avoid having two copies of OneDrive running. When using the machine-wide installer, there’s one copy of OneDrive installed into C:\Program Files and it gets updated for all users via a scheduled task. At the same time, support for the ARM65 OneDrive installer was added.
• Fixed an issue with the background wallpaper not appearing on devices with a preconfigured OEM theme, and a separate issue where wallpaper would not appear when Spotlight was enabled (so it is now being disabled).
• Added additional apps to the list of in-box apps to be removed. That includes DevHome, consumer Teams, and the new Outlook. (As always, you can tweak this list yourself.)
• Added logic for most of the tweaks so that they can be skipped via changes to the config.xml file instead of requiring that you edit the PowerShell script.
• Added logic to skip the security/privacy pages in OOBE during an Autopilot v2 deployment, based on logic from Rudy Ooms. See https://call4cloud.nl/autopilot-device-preparation-hide-privacy-settings/ for more information.
• Added logic to install a list of apps from WinGet (as a convenience).
• Added logic to update in-box apps, as well as to kick off a Windows Update scan (to avoid the delay before Windows would do it, which usually is hours later).
• Added logic to remove Windows features. This will remove PowerShell 2.0, Recall, the Workfolders Client, and Media Playback features by default; configure the list in the Config.xml file.
• Added logic to configure a lock screen image.

There is one known issue:

• .NET 3.5 will not install on Windows 11 24H2, failing with an error 0x80070020 after several minutes. There is no known solution to this (not obvious what file/folder is in use, or what you could do about it), other than waiting to install that later. After the failure occurs, no other servicing operations will work without first rebooting the computer to complete the needed rollback of the changes made. As a result of this, the default Config.xml file does not specify to install .NET 3.5.

As always, if you have any suggestions or find any issues, please submit them on https://github.com/mtniehaus/AutopilotBranding/issues. If you want to make any changes yourself, submit a pull request to contribute them back to the community.