Tuesday 13 December 2011

Citrix Receiver and Online plug-in running at the same time


** UPDATE 14/04/2012 *****


Citrix has resolved the issue in Receiver 3.2. Please see this article point 33


** UPDATE 23/03/2012 *****

The version of the Receiver that will fix the issues is Citrix Receiver 13.1.001.10. Citrix will release a knowledge base article ID CTX132171 in a couple of weeks. Unfortatnly I had to downgrade 100 clients as the solution came to late. I hope it helps you all.

** UPDATE 7/03/2012 CITRIX HAS A FIX **

Hi All, I have been working with Citrix and they now have a fix.

Apparently it's a timing issue. Sometimes receiver.exe does not successfully register with windows in time during the start-up process.  

The testing will likely be completed in 8 to 10 weeks so if you can't wait you may need to downgrade as I have.

** UPDATE 9/02/2012 THIS DOESN'T WORK FOR ME **

Apply this key to all of your citrix servers. Restart your client and problem resolved.

Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Citrix/wfshell/TWI
Value Name: SeamlessFlags
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Values: Flags 0x20


The Citrix article can be found here, option number 5.
A thread on the issue was located here


** UPDATE  2/02/2012  THE BELOW SOLUTION DOES NOT WORK ***
Hi everyone, hopefully this will save you all days of troubleshooting as it created for me.
Before I give you the background, I will give you the solution.
Enable the following GPOs and make sure your workstations have more than 1 GB of RAM.

Computer Configuration => Administrative Templates => System => Scripts => Run logon scripts synchronously
Computer Configuration => Administrative Templates => System => Scripts => Run startup scripts asynchronously


I created a new GPO and applied a WMI filter for systems with 1 GB or less. This is so the newer systems do not get these settings.
SELECT TotalPhysicalMemory FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE TotalPhysicalMemory <= 1050000000
Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem Where Not (Caption Like "%server%")
Background:

I upgraded all of our workstations from the Citrix online plug-in to the new Citrix receiver 3.0 and 13.0 enterprise client. I used SCCM and Citrix’s merchandising server to deploy the new versions.

Majority of our workstations didn’t have any issues however a few did. Workstations that had the issue displayed the XenApp plug-in and receiver in the system tray. When a user tried to open a published resource, it would create an endless loop of refreshing the citrix applications. 



I stumbled across this article and this article. I thought that they may be my solution too, but they were not.  I re-imaged the workstation with our SOE and deployed the receiver and client with the same result.  I deployed the same SOE to a VM box and the error did not occur. It didn’t make any sense. It had to be a software issue didn't it?
The solution came to me when I caught onto the following common traits:

  • Only occured on old workstations.
  • Only happened for the first user to logon to a powered off workstation

It occurred to me. I dropped the RAM of the VM SOE to 512mb of RAM and the error was reproduced. I increased the RAM to 1 GB and the error was gone.

Don’t ask me why but I assume the workstation needs time to process the new Citrix reciever and enterprise client, before the user logs on. When a workstation has less memory it takes longer so the above solution works for me. 

Please let me know your results. I tried everything under the sun to resolve this issue, I would love to know if the above works out to be your solution.

Regards,

Blair