Today’s blog is about an application that was migrated to Citrix XenApp. During testing the users reported that several application menu’s were missing.

An example is the settings menu where the System tab is missing:

Fat Client:	XenApp:

I suspected a permissions issue so I added the account to the Local Administrator group to verify that. And indeed the System tab was visible.

Process Monitor
I removed the account from the Administrators group and fired up Process Monitor. I set a filter on the process name (ra60.exe) and on Result (ACCESS DENIED):

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Today I was troubleshooting the application “Harmony Client” which crashed upon exiting:

The application had been thinapped and the error only appeared when starting the thinapped version.

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Today I was troubleshooting a Thinapped Visual Basic Application. The application halts with a Run-time error ‘372’ when trying to run a report:

Microsoft KB article kb942870 hints to an ActiveX component that is registered into HKCU instead of HKLM.

A trace with the ThinApp Log Monitor reveals that the application is looking for an ActiveX component under HKCU:

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Recently I needed to create an Unattended Install for an application that uses a piece of software (for scanning) called Kofax VRS.

This Kofax software comes with an .msi file but there was no documentation on the install options.

In fact it didn’t seem like the Vendor anticipated on an Unatttended Install.

I browsed in the msi file using Microsoft’s Orca tool and tried some of the properties I found in the public properties table.

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Another post on something that happened last week, this time it’s about a Java based Application again.

This particular application wanted to download three DLL’s from the Webserver to the Java bin directory.

This presents us with several issues on a multi user server such as a Citrix of Terminal Server:

1. The user does not have write permissions in this directory
2. If we we give the user write permissions here what happens when the DLL’s are in use by another user?

I assumed that if I preinstalled the DLL’s the application wouldn’t try to overwrite them but that didn’t work.

Then I monitored with Process Monitor if the Application wrote some kind of check file but at first I didn’t find anything.

So I decided to use the CorrectFilePaths shim to redirect the DLL’s to the user’s homedirectory (see Using the CorrectFilePaths shim to redirect an ini file to a writable location for an explanation).

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A few days ago I was packaging an application that was writing an INI file in the application directory.

If you have read my earlier article, Using the CorrectFilePaths shim to redirect an ini file to a writable location, then you will probably think: create a nice shim and redirect that ini file!

But this application had a few challenges, the first being that it writes %COMPUTERNAME%.INI. The application’s developer probably assumed that a user is bound to one pc and that no other user’s use that pc.

To solve it we we need to catch all possible computer names (it would be nice if the CorrectFilePaths shims was able to accept wildcards and environment variables).

But it doesn’t so it means we have to add a parameter for each possible computer name. In my case that was doable because I have only 8 Citrix servers.

So I created a Fix using the Application Compatibility Manager as described in my previous post.

However it didn’t work, so I started to trace what happens.

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Yesterday I created an Unattended Installation of a webapplication. Of course it was “just a web link” and the application vendor usually says: you don’t need to install it just go the URL and that’s it.

The reality is usually that you go to the URL and need to install several (ActiveX) components and maybe other dependencies such as Java.

While a user may have the permissions for this on his own pc, on a Citrix or Terminal Server environment this is highly unlikely.

So we need to package and pre-install this for the users.

Nothing special so far but this particular application had some special things that were interesting enough to blog about.

So let’s start with what happened, I visited the URL of an application called Centric Key 2 Financien.

First I got a few popups with Certificates that needed to be accepted:

The application’s instructions say that the user must accept this and set the “Always trust content from this publisher” checkbox.

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Lately I wrote a few articles about fixing bad applications using Compatibility Shims. If you didn’t read them yet, here are the links: 

• Using the CorrectFilePaths shim to redirect an ini file to a writable location
• Using the CorrectFilePaths Shim with Visual Basic Applications
• Redirect Global Object to Local Objects (aka fix that bad app!)

I also described that you can install an Application Compatibility Database using the sdbinst command.

At first I just took a script task in my Altiris Server to deploy the database using sdbinst -q <dbname> but later on I got a better idea.

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My collegue that is working with me on the current project was packaging another application that uses Oracle.

The interesting thing about it is that he ran into the same error I did: the Oracle client tries to create (and access) an Object in the Global namespace.

But he got an entirely different error message:

To confirm it was the same issue I gave a test user the Create Global Objects privilege and after logging on again the problem went away.

So I applied the same fix that I wrote about yesterday in Redirect Global Object to Local Objects (aka fix that bad app!) to this application and it worked nicely!

Today I was working on Unattended Installation of an Application called SmartDocuments.

The application seemed to behave nicely on a Multi User (Citrix/Terminal Server) environment: it writes user configuration to the user part of the registry and writes configuration files in a user accessible path.

When testing with a normal user account I ran into a problem though, I got an Oracle ORA-01019 error message:

The English message is ORA01019: unable to allocate memory in the user side.

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