I was trying run Sysprep on a spare notebook in order to test image capture via Windows Deployment Services when I received a rather unhelpful error message: “A fatal error has occurred while trying to sysprep the machine.” After looking into the error log I found something more useful and ran a search for drmv2clt.dll sysprep and found the following thread:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/c469805c-98af-4bb2-9655-c86c294470a9/sysprep-failure-occurred-while-executing-drmv2cltdll-fix?forum=w7itproinstall

The OP of the thread figured out that the issue was due to the “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” – as soon as I disabled the service I was able to run sysprep successfully. It is interesting how this thread dates back to 2009 and how another poster writes that this issue was fixed in Windows 7 RTM; I was running sysprep on a notebook running Windows 7 SP1 with all current updates.

Sometimes I don’t remember all the commands for creating a USB installer for Windows 7; most of the time I google “ars technica usb install” to look at their great article. But here are the commands I like to use (slight variation from Ars Technica):

Open a command prompt window as administrator:

Now you can copy the contents of your Windows ISO to your flash drive and boot from it to install Windows.