Nothing in your setup changed. The stick worked in spring and half-fails in autumn. The missing suspect is the calendar: Windows Setup itself is a moving target, and unattended media quietly expires.
Drift is the least dramatic failure mode on this page list and the most common in real workshops. No bug, no mistake - just an answer file faithfully answering questions the new Windows build no longer asks in the same way, while new questions nobody answered appear on screen, or worse, get defaulted silently.
Microsoft revises the out-of-box experience with feature updates: account flows get stricter, new promotional and privacy screens appear, policy files change format. Rufus's changelog is a public diary of this chase - one release adds an option to copy a policy file tied to a specific knowledge-base article, another adds support for a new certificate requirement that only applies to a specific Windows build's ISO. Each of those entries is an answer file being re-aimed at a moved target. Expect drift; it is the normal state of unattended installation, not an exception.
Drift fails loudly or quietly, and quiet is worse. Loudly: a new unanswered screen appears mid-install, and your 'silent' install waits forever for a click that the log of your day says already happened. Quietly: a screen your file used to suppress is restructured, the suppression misses, and the finished PC simply has the account type or the bundled app you thought you had excluded - discovered weeks later, if at all. The 4.14 checkbox fault was a tool bug; drift needs no bug at all, which is why it survives every fix release.
None of this means unattended installation is a bad idea - fleets are built on it. It means its real cost is not the setup but the maintenance: every Windows feature update re-opens the question 'do my answers still land?' Enterprises pay that cost with dedicated testing; a small workshop pays it with one bench PC and thirty minutes per ISO. What you cannot honestly do is write the answer file once and trust it forever - the 4.14 story was a bug, but drift is a law.
Watch the video for the bug side of the story, and adopt the retest habit on this page for the drift side - between them, your unattended installs stay boring, which is the goal.
▶️ Watch Full VideoProbably not - that is the classic drift signature, especially if the stop is at a screen you do not remember existing. Recreate the media with a current Rufus build matched to your ISO, and bench-test once while watching.
You can freeze drift, but the ISO ages into unsupported Windows builds with no security updates. Trading drift for an unpatched operating system is a bad bargain; the retest habit is the sustainable answer.
Much less. A normal install keeps a human at the screen, so a new prompt is answered on the spot. Drift punishes exactly the installs nobody watches - which is why unattended media carries the retest duty.