Setup: You try to deploy a new virtual machine with Virtual Machine Manager
Problem: You receive an error : Windows could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass [specialize]
To automate the provisioning of new VMs from templates, VMM can pass the answer file to Windows during sysprep customization. If you create a guest OS profile with a syntactically valid product key but invalid for the OS being deployed, you will get the following error during specialization.
Windows could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass [specialize]. The settings specified in the answer file cannot be applied. The error was detected while processing settings for component[Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup].
Solution: Check the product key to be valid for that version of Windows you try to deploy.