[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III Windows Mobile ROM De] bengalih:
Hey _Alex_, long time no talk.

Anyway, I was trying to get back into a little cooking...really for personal use. It got so time consuming that I haven't even touched it in a while.

Basically, as you may remember I am a big proponent of using the official stock ROMs, as I think the more tinkering and cross-porting generally causes more stability issues. So I am using the latest official AT&T 6.1 release.

For starters, and to refresh my cooking skills the first thing I was trying to do was strip out some unneeded folders and icons from the start menu.

Specifically I wanted to get rid of all the *.aac music files in \Windows and the AT&T Mall program group (with all the "Shop" shortcuts.)

Using the latest Kaiser kitchen I extracted the ROM and then went into the OEM\OperatorPKG folder and deleted all the *.aac. All good there...

Then I opened up the mxipupdate_oemoperators_106.provxml file and deleted the following so that the registry entries needed for the icon were gone:

<!-- Define the AT&T Mall folder icon -->
<characteristic type="Registry">
<characteristic type="HKCR\AT_Mall\DefaultIcon" translation="filesystem" >
<parm name="Default" datatype="string" value="FolderIcon_PPC.dll,-113" translation="filesystem" />
</characteristic>
<characteristic type="HKCR\AT_Mall\SelectIcon" translation="filesystem" >
<parm name="Default" datatype="string" value="FolderIcon_PPC.dll,-113" translation="filesystem" />
</characteristic>
</characteristic>

Then from Menu_Operation.xml I removed a bunch of entries in the following format:

<characteristic type="%CE11%\AT&T Mall" translation="install">
<characteristic type="MakeDir"/>
</characteristic>
<characteristic type="%CE11%\AT&T Mall\5 Shop Applications.lnk" translation="install">
<characteristic type="Copy">
<parm name="Source" value="%CE2%\Shop Applications.lnk" translation="install"/>
</characteristic>
</characteristic>

There was one of these for each of the 6 icons. I also removed the corresponding .lnk files in the directory as well as the .EXE files that they all linked to.

When I rebuilt my ROM these were indeed gone, but so to were the proper icons for the other folders...and many icons were in the root of \Programs instead of being in the right sub-folders. It appears that the XML file didn't process at all to operate on what I left in.

Question: Do you see anything glaringly wrong with what I did? Do you know of issues with editing these XML files that would cause them not to process. I went over each entry and it doesn't appear I removed anything except what I wanted, so I can't figure out what is going on.

I have a few other related questions to re-building a ROM. First off, I usually use the option (a) for rebuilding with the old method...since I am not usually adding packages, just removing things.

UPDATE: Well, it seems like I am at fault here... the XML file is very finicky. It seems that, among other things, if it tries to do an operation on a file that doesn't exist...it hoses the whole thing. I can't exactly figure out everything that causes it to go haywire, as I appear to be using the proper syntax... however I have been going through with a very fine toothed comb and it seems to be getting better.

Question: When I extract a ROM and get the os.nb...if I rebuild it without making any changes, the os-new.nb that gets created is significantly smaller (10MB or more). If no changes were made, why is the rebuilt ROM so much smaller? It would seem as if I were losing something. Do you have any guess as to why this is? Is there a more proper way to just rebuild an extracted ROM?

UPDATE: I must have been comparing an older file... indeed the file sizes match

Question: Those XML files that i am editing, like mxipupdate_oemoperators_106.provxml, don't seem to be on the device. I would think they should be in the \Windows directory like all the other files that then get copied out.. it seems these mxip*.xml files are somehow special... where are they stored?

Question: Since I am using the latest 6.1 ROM I wanted to confirm that there shouldn't be a problem using your kitchen. Am I still ok with yours? If not, do you know of what methods I can use instead to work with these 6.1 ROMS?

I'll leave it at that for now... once I can figure out why this isn't working I will try to do some more and might have some more questions down the road.

hope you're well!