well i've made a couple of windows 7 PE images, one using WAIK and one using PE3 Builder. the one made with WAIK sux because there is no shell, and all it does is load whatever exe you set for it to run at boot. the one made with PE3 Builder is very good, but there is no support for usb drives. the drivers are present in the system32 folders of the wim, but when a usb drive is plugged in it is not found by windows explorer. this is a real hindrance because when working on other machines i typically extract files to a thumb drive for saving instead of saving them on another partition on the hdd so that as soon as i am done i have all that i need before moving on the in the repair/restore/reinstall process. i could just use an XP PE disc but i'd rather have something a little more updated any ideas???
also, MY 7 PE is just the same as PE3 Builder in that there is no usb compatibility but i have found that Make_PE3_41 works perfectly without WAIK installed and all drivers including usb drivers work just like they should. so i've answered my own need... hope this info helps others who are wanting to make their own 7 PE images that work perfectly.