Jesse,
I don't have an unattend baked in, I've confirmed that.
We have just started to use more variables in the templates, but this issue was ocurring before we started doing that.
I have looked at the unattend file that gets injected and all components are there and intact before the generalize phase runs. It is after that and the drivers loaded from the PnP store and it hits the specialize pass that I get the "unable to parse or process c:\windows\panther\unattend.xml... line X character X..." When I look at the unattend in that location, it is blank past the line and character referenced in the error message.
It seems to be that there is a process that is rewriting the unattend, since the unattend that gets injected to c:\windows\panther is larger in file size than the one that is left after the generalize pass. I have looked in the logs, but haven't seen any clue as to why the unattend is getting cut off before it runs the specialize pass.
I have done a bit of digging on the intertubes to try to find out information as to what is happening when the generalize phase passes control off to the specialize pass. It seems as though this should be logged, but either I am missing it or it is being logged somewhere else outside of the setupact.log and setuperr.log.
Thanks for your reply.