Modify default profile in Windows 7 with the least amount of effort

I’ve received a question on why Microsoft stopped supporting the old way of making changes to the default user profile in Windows 7. As you might already know the only supported way to make changes to the default user profile is to make them with a local user account and then sysprep the image with an answer file containing CopyProfile=TRUE.

The question or should I say problem is that the user in question find it ineffective to make changes to the default user profile, by installing the image to a machine then make the changes and once again to sysprep and capture the image.

Fortunately there is a much more effective way to make changes (though unsupported). Just mount the image using imagex or dism, and then add or remove the files you want. If you want to change some settings they most likely stored in the registry so then you can just start the regedit.exe utility as usual and then mount the ntuser.dat file within the image to make the changes and when done just applying the changes and you are done!