Or will it be missing any vital drivers?

Probably.
The DriverPacks were made with the already supplied with XP drivers in mind, eg, there's no need to include a driver if it is already in the Driver.CAB and has not been updated since.
As there's a lot of legacy and vintage HW supported by Windows, it is unlikely there a newer drivers out for most of them.
We only add drivers to the DriverPacks if a device could not have been installed successfully already, which means the driver.CAB had no driver included.
If it works fine out-of-the-box, there's no need for a DP.
In fact, if MS supplied the latest drivers for all devices via Windows Update, this project would have never come to exists I guess

So, if you really want to, you could extract all the *.INF files from driver.CAB and compare them to those included in the DriverPacks.
If you cannot find duplicates or newer files, then you need to keep them in order to maintain support for the specific device.
If not, you can toss them out and save a little space.

However, the Printer DriverPacks are pretty large, mainly because of these stupid GUI printer drivers (yay for no Linux and network support!) and their horrendously blwon-up *.EXEs...
So I doubt you'll save a lot of space, and this will take a lot of time.
Unless you're very critically at your space limit, it's not worth the efford, IMO.

I always leave the driver.CAB untouched and it has always worked out fine
Using the Printers DriverPacks  you couldn't fit it onto a CD anyway and if you move to DVD you should have more than enough space.

3. I see you are including two MS hotfixes along with Bst-base(KB888111 & KB921401). Both of them are already there in the latest RVMUpdatePack-Ver-2.1.5a (Dec-17,2006).  When using RVM Integrator-1.4.2, and then slipstreaming BST-Pack, is there any clash due to this duplication? Pls Clarify?

You must slipstream the DriverPacks AFTER you've slipstreamed an UpdatePack. If an UpdatePack is detected, the DriverPacks BASE won't slipstream any hotfixes.

I cannot speak for this, since I didn't make those DriverPacks: they're unofficial!

(a) Suppose first i remove  all the (printer + scanner + modem ) drivers from the driver/sp2.cab  in the xp-sp2-source. ( I am using Removal addons from ENu_User with RVM Integrator).

(b) Then I slipstream  all the BST-3rdpartydriverpacks  for (printer, scanner, modem).

The resulting source at the end, whether it will be uptodate?  w.r.to the printer/scanner drivers i mean.
Or will it be missing any vital drivers?

2. Correct again, I could only think it would cause a problem if there is an issue with a newer driver. This is unlikely anyway, especially as we have a lot of testers here.

3. No idea.

1) The DriverPacks only include drivers that are either outdated in the default driver set of Windows, or that aren't included. So as few as possible double drivers are included.  Driver.cab is not touched, because repackaging takes very long .....

Thanks for your clarification BS & lightsout.

1. What I understand from your clarification is that, in the case of an outdated driver in "Driver.cab" file in XP-SP2-CD, the new driver will be included in your Bst-pack, but the old one is not removed from driver.cab, because of speed (execution time) & compression issues.  But during Windows-XP install, the system/hardware will automatically select & use the latest driver from Bst-pack instead of the old one from the driver.cab. (Did i get it right?).

2. Also the way it is conceived, even if I remove some parts of your Bstpack (Remove & Repack), the resulting slipstreamed CD will be anyway better than the original XP-SP2-CD.   What I mean is it will not be worser than using the original XP-SP2-CD, purely from a driver locating perspective, during windows install.
Your comments.

3. I see you are including two MS hotfixes along with Bst-base(KB888111 & KB921401). Both of them are already there in the latest RVMUpdatePack-Ver-2.1.5a (Dec-17,2006).  When using RVM Integrator-1.4.2, and then slipstreaming BST-Pack, is there any clash due to this duplication? Pls Clarify?

Thanks & regards[/color]

I'd be surprised, 7-zip manages higher compression than a lot of other formats (including RAR).

Indeed.

Should you actually manage to achieve better compression, feel free to put some examples online so we can verify the results.
I'd be very surprised, though.

Are you sure B'the Sneaky ?

Because with CABARC we can get a higher ratio than  7zip

Thx

2) As answered by lightsout: yes, you can

2 - yes, this is perfectly safe (as long as you don't need those drivers of course!).

1. After the DriverPack Slipstream process on XP-SP2, even though some *.sy_ files are modified & some are newly added into the i386 folder, the original DRIVER.CAB file is left untouched.  Also the final image has all the driverpacks (7z file sets) in the OEM folder.

Does this mean that there is (can be) some duplication in the driverpack.7z versus the existing DRIVER.CAB, and the old version drivers in the driver.cab file is not removed.   Or is that by design the BST driverpacks (7zs) only include post-SP2 drivers, and hence the full driver.cab is still necessary? 

2. If I want to prune and use some BST DriverPacks, is it safe to delete some subfolders (within *.7z)  & repack them?  My question is especially for Graphics-B  & Sound-B driver packs.

Thanks & regards