I know, both topics were discussed countless times.
Still, I would like to have CF card as bootable drive. What can I use as OS: WinXP, WinXPE or Linux. WindowsXP still keeps writing to registry, ini files, logs, etc... you can turn off swap, but you will not eliminates writes. And it is known fact that writes kill CF card eventually. You are left with two choices: XPE or Linux on r/o partition.

Because creating XPE image is just pure pain and you end-up with 120 days evaluation anyway. And the only thing you in fact need from XPE is EWF - Enhanced Write Filter, a piece of code that redirects all the writes to "black hole". The other efet of XPE (size) can be acchieved with nLite easily. Sooo... I was thinking about a little cheat: take a EWF component of XPE, extract its files and corresponding registry keys and import them to reg. WindowsXP (stripped down to minimum). What do you say to such idea? Any1 willing to do that, since I do not have my evaluation copy of XPE anymore?