One of the lesser known features of VMware ThinApp is that you can supply a Virtual Computer name.

This is documented as follows in the package.ini reference guide:

VirtualComputerName Parameter
The VirtualComputerName parameter determines whether to rename the computer name, to avoid naming conflicts between the capture process and the deployment process.

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This blog is about an issue with VMware ThinApp and Office 2010 I discovered a while ago.

Environment
Customer is using Office 2003 natively on a Citrix XenApp 5 environment. Some users had a business need for Office 2010, therefore a ThinApp with Office 2010 was created (this customer uses ThinApp for App-Virt).

To make the picture complete: Thinapp version is 4.7.2-771812 and Office version is 2010 SP1 (14.0.6024.1000) .

Symptoms
Users complained that Office 2010 was very slow. Most noticeable was Outlook 2010 which was completely unusable.

Outlook startup time was minutes rather than seconds and while starting it seemed to delay on loading profile.

When Outlook was finally started, switching between folders and layouts felt really sluggish.

For example when switching from Calendar to Inbox took a few seconds, after which it would take almost 20 seconds for the e-mails to show. Switching between e-mail would take 2-3 seconds to display the contents in the reading pane.

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Yesterday I showed a video demonstrating it’s possible to run multiple instances of the Microsoft Lync 2010 client simultaneously.

A little warning before we go on: the Lync Client was not designed to run with multiple instances. Or better said: it was designed specifically to prevent this, let’s see how it does this:

On startup Lync calls an internal function called COcAppNoUI::InitializeMainInstance. In this function it creates a Mutex named “Office Communicator_” in the Global namespace. It also creates an Event in the Global namespace called “COMMUNICATOR-“.

When a second instance of Lync is launched it checks if the Global Mutex exists and if it does it fires the Global Event. The Main instance has a thread that waits for this event using the WaitForMultipleObjects API.

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