Windows has been telling me for the last 10 minutes that it is either "Taking care of a few things" or "Almost ready":
What is going on behind the scenes when it says this, and is there any way of getting it to display a console output instead of this splash screen?
This is the way the installer tells you that it is still working. The alternative would be a 'silent' screen and you would wonder what is going on. The Chrome installer does it the same way.
10 minutes for that is a tad long but that could be because your system does have reduced resources like a slow disk, slow CPU little RAM, etc.
Can you elaborate on the "console output" question. I am not sure what you are looking for.
In essence, Windows is generating unique Security Identifiers and doing other post-deployment tasks (check sysprep and unattend.xml to get an idea of the stuff that's going on in detail).
Check C:\windows\setupact.log and C:\windows\setuperr.log.
Specifically, when this message is being displayed Windows is executing the oobeUser portion of the answer file that Microsoft SysPrepped it with (or your answer file if you repackaged it). It's building out your user profile by copying over the Default user profile and then individualizing it for you.
