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Intrigued to learn about options moving away from golden images. I also work at a school and like @MartinByard and @kha11 there is so much software to be pre-loaded and pre-setting windows/application settings. I have moved to having scripts install more things post-image and hope to continue moving in that direction, which is why I'm interested in the non-SCCM options ($$). With that said, golden images still work and we've made quite a few under Windows 10. Like others have said, don't feature update a pc in audit mode. If you need to upgrade a golden image, finish the sysprep sequence, update it, and then put it back in sysprep. We keep a "config" image, which is the image in audit mode just before we OOBE it and capture it into the image we use for deployment. If we need to make minor updates we use the config, and if we need to feature update we use the captured one, sysprep, and make a new image. We have it down to being able to create a golden image for a new machine in a day. The Windows Store and AppX things do cause a problem. I have scripts that remove all the non-standard / non-pre-installed stuff that frequently doesn't work with sysprep. And then you post-install and pre-stage the others. This can be a pain because it works best/easiest if you can download all of the appx packages locally. We've been successful so far using tools to grab them behind the scenes from Microsoft.

Your post helped us fix this issue in our organization. Thanks.