WinPE7 x86 problems

Hello,
I posted a question dealing w/ PE a long time ago, but I now have started the learning process again; believe me I need a lot of learning.

I’ve working w/ a Windows 7 x86 PE USB boot image. I can burn the boot image to a USB drive w/o a problem and will boot fine, but that’s where my low level experience steps in. I’m working w/ the WinPE 7 on a x64 Win 8 laptop but don’t think that’d make a difference.

I run bsexplorer in the winpeshl.ini the explorer.exe file starts but has serious problems. When I use run from the start menu, hit browse, a window doesn’t even come up for me to pick a particular file out. There’s also no my computer icon on the desktop, and I’d really like to be able to see what devices need drivers, but I think getting that far is a long ways away. Maybe a missing driver causes the problem to begin w/?

There are a lot of premade WinPEs to download, and there are a lot of WInPEs called Gandell’s WinPE. What I’m trying to do, and haven’t had any luck finding this yet, is to look at the start up files from the ISO mentioned above. I look at the startnet.cmd, and all I see is winpeinit.

I’d like to see what Gandell’s WinPE uses to get its desktop going. A desktop that has my computer on it & functions to get to device manager. Is there a portable app that gives you the desktop w/ the my computer, gets you to device manager, etc? I search through the ISO file along w/ the boot.wim file but don’t see any unattend files. Would what I’m trying to accomplish be done through a XML?

Again, there are a lot of premade WinPEs or programs that will practically make the PE for you, but I’d really like to at least get a stable WinPE made by me going.

Would getting the desktop I want require xml scripts, registry entries, and so on?

I mount the boot.wim to edit the startup files. I’ve also included a screen shot of what the desktop looks like. I tried to start paint of my WinPE to paste the screen shot, but when I clicked the paint icon nothing happened.

I know WinPE is a very broad topic, & making a WinPE on your own may be a trial & error process, but thought I may get some ideas asking my question(s) here. I guess WinPE could be considered a system utility?

Any suggestions or ideas?

Any help will be much appreciated.
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