Yes, WAIK (basically, parts of it) are what RT7 and Vlite use(d) to do their job. RT7 lite just puts a nice GUI over the top of it, so that the WAIK is less intimidating (and complex) to use. By the way, Vlite went out of development years ago, at the same time nlite did - nuhi apparently had too much on his plate to continue it. He didn't open source it, though, which is a shame since it could've been put back into development immediately if he had - instead we had to wait about 18 months for a relatively similar bit of kit from a different group of people to come along.

Right click on the folders within My Documents and right click > properties. Select the Location tab then select "Move". One thing though, even if you reinstall and SID's change, you can simply update the permissions on the folders - the following commands can be used from an elevated command prompt to do so. Replace the bold segments as appropriate. Files: takeown /f file_name /d y icacls file_name /grant administrators:F Folders: takeown /f directory_name /r /d y icacls directory_name /grant administrators:F /t Obviously if the directory/file path has spaces in it, you'd need to encase file_name or directory_name in quotes.

RT7 Lite supports it, but of course you could always fall back on "Old Faithful" and simply use the Windows Automated Installation Kit to perform the slipstreaming.

Until Microsoft implements application level virtualization for older programs, there is no way WinSxS will disappear. It's the lesser of two evils, without this no software would've worked properly in Vista and now Windows 7 without being rewritten to use the new Vista versions of files. Can you imagine how much worse Vista would've been seen if Microsoft basically told every one of it's 100k+ strong programming community to just tough up and recode every single application specifically for Vista? Not even going to bother thinking about in-house software here.

They are created and owned by the SYSTEM process. If you intentionally mess with the file ownership and permissions, they work properly as standard directory hard links. They are designed to be written to by installers, Windows directs the files to their proper locations on-the-fly (as they did with early 64-bit software still trying to write data to 32-bit secific folders and registry keys), rather than accessed via Explorer by standard users.

These are special directory hardlinks primarily used for programs hard coded to write to specific, depreciated folders (Documents and settings, Application Data, etc, instead of using %appdata% or %userprofile%). You cannot access these directly, but you can, however, delete them, if you know none of your programs do not access these specific folders in this specific way. Microsoft makes its money on the back of companies who have many bespoke pieces of software and would require compatibility with new versions of windows to keep their revenue stream high - I can't say I've never found a commercial piece of software which writes to these folders specifically (yet...), but I can't say the same for in-house software coded for a specific operating system (IE, XP or 2000). As for the folders in %appdata% with "My" in front of their name, this is just trickery - the directory may be named "My *", but the actual path omits the "My". You can check by clicking in the breadcrumb (address) bar until it turns into a path. Oh, and, if you're wondering - if you DO delete these hardlinks, and then install a piece of software that would try to write to these directories, nothing particularly bad will happen - they will simply recreate the directories in a standard way (ie, real folders). Using hardlinks like this just keeps all the relevant data in one spot. Hope this clears up any confusion.

The version of RDP built into Windows XP doesn't have the same level of multi-monitor support as the newer versions built into Windows 7 (possibly vista - I've never tested this, though). Unfortunately, only spanning is possible when you are connecting to a machine running XP.