Remko Weijnen's Blog (Remko's Blog)

About Virtualization, VDI, SBC, Application Compatibility and anything else I feel like

Archive for the ‘Windows 7’ Category

Today I was troubleshooting a warning message that popped up when launching a network application with RES Workspace Manager:

The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?

Usually this is a simple fix: add the servername (file://server) to the Local Intranet zone:

You can add and remove websites from this zone. All websites in this zone will use the zone's security settings.

That worked when I launched the application directly. However when launching the application with RES Workspace Manager I would still get the warning. Even stranger: when I clicked Cancel the application would still be launched.

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RD Gateway connection fails on Windows 7

I needed to connect remotely via Remote Desktop to a Windows Server 2012 machine.

I received an rdp file that was configured to use an RD Gateway server:

Remtoe Desktop Connection | RD Gateway Server Settings

However when trying to connect from my Windows 7 laptop (x64) machine, I got the following error message:

The two computers couldn't connect in the amount of time allocated. Try connecting again. If the problem continues, contact your network administrator or technical support.

 

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ClickOnce is a Microsoft technology that enables an end user to install an application from the web without administrative permissions.

That’s great isn’t it?
While ClickOnce may sound great to developers it’s actually a nightmare for Enterprise administrators because they try to prevent users from installing software themselves.

ClickOnce also incorporates an Automatic Updates mechanism which means that users might run different or not tested/approved versions…

Virtual Environments
It get’s even worse in virtual environments such as VDI and SBC where machines are often non-persistent. Each time the users starts the application they will see a screen similar to the one below while they actually download and install it over and over again:

SNAGHTML87937a

If the environment is persistent, it’s not guaranteed that the user works on the same machine each day. This means that the application will be installed on every box the user ever logs onto…

How does it work?
In order to understand how we can best treat ClickOnce applications we need to understand how they work since MSDN documentation does not describe this in detail.

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My Network Places Internals

Nethood IconI am using a PowerShell script to copy some elements of from the users old profile location to a new location. This includes the Nethood ("My Network Places") folder which contains the Network Places shortcuts.

A user reported that she could not save documents to Network Places anymore and after inspection the Network Places shortcuts were broken.

I started comparing the old Nethood folder to the new and observed the following difference in Explorer:

image

When copying entries from the Nethood folder with Explorer manually they worked fine, so somehow Explorer gives the Nethood folder special treatment.

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Switching to the Services Session

Just read a tweet from @andyjmorgan about Interactive Service Detection. This made me remember that it’s possible to switch to the Session 0 with an undocumented api in winsta.dll.

For this API to work you must have the Interactive Services Detection (UI0Detect) service running.

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Hibernation fails in Windows 7

A while ago my Windows 7 laptop suddenly refused to go into Hibernation. The strange thing was that the whole process of saving memory to the hibernate file seemed to work correctly. The screen would go black and there was lots of disk activity. Then after the disk activity finished the system would return to the logon screen.

A Google on this issue learned that the most likely cause was a driver preventing the system from going into hibernation. Using the cmdline “powercfg -DEVICEQUERY wake_armed” we can check if there are any devices that can wake the system. Another useful parameter is -ENERGY which generates an html report file.

But in my case this lead to nothing.

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  • Filed under: Windows 7
  • Speed up Windows 7 Resume by 20%

    UPDATE: See this new article by Helge Klein.

    Recently Helge Klein wrote a blog titled How to Speed Up Your Windows 7 Boot Time by 20%. He does this by disabling the graphical animation that Windows 7 displays while booting.

    After applying this tweak I noticed that a resume from hibernation (which I do far more often than a full boot) still showed the graphical animation (and wasn’t speed up).

    So how to disable the animation while resuming?

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  • 2 Comments
  • Filed under: Windows 7
  • I wanted to save the SHSH signatures from my iPhone before updating to iOS 5.01. I started Tiny Umbrella but it showed an error indicating that there’s already a process listening on port 80:

    Cannot Start TSS Service | DO NOT TRY RESTORING YOUR DEVICE!!! | System(PID:4) must be killed!!

    I verified this using netstat (netstat -aon | find /I “LISTENING” | find /I “:80”):

    netstat -aon | find /i "LISTENING" | find /i ":80"

     

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    Remote Registry from 32 to 64 bit

    imageYesterday I needed to set a few registry keys remotely from a 32 bit windows machine to a 64 bit machine.

    I used reg.exe to set the key but even though it returned success the key wasn’t altered.

    As I suspected the key was written to the Wow6432Node. In the help I couldn’t find any switch to force reg.exe to use the 64-bit view.

    On a 64 bit machine this is not a problem since both 32- and 64 bit versions of reg.exe exists. The 32 bit version of reg.exe defaults to the 32 bit view and the 64 bit version defaults to the 64 bit view.

    But luckily reg.exe has a switch (that is not listed in the help) to force the View:

    SNAGHTML1aaf7885In Windows 7 and 2008 R2 all IP Addresses are by default registered in DNS.

    If you don’t want certain IP addresses to appear in DNS you can alter this behavior with Netsh using the skipassource flag.

    Use the following syntax to add an additional IP Address with skipassource flag:

    (more…)

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