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






10 comments:

  1. Great find! I'm curious what would happen if you disabled the pagefile and performed the split-test again with different RAM sizes. There are definitely multiple possible causes of this common problem so the more solutions and workarounds the better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Ben,

    Thanks for your feedback. I was thinking the same thing. I'll give it a test tomorrow and report back.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Exactly the same problem here on W7 x86 Enterprise version with the latest v3.1 release just before Christmas. I had exactly the same problem with the v3.0 release so went back to v12. I'm not going to venture down the above policy changes as we have a central domain policy and changes to logon/start-up scripts would have to be carefully tested.

    I still think Citrix's installation program is leaving *something* installed/running.

    When I get this fault, I see both pnamain.exe & receiver.exe running. If I end them both, then re-run receiver from the startup folder, all is well.

    I've just installed receiver again and will scour the hard drive for pnamain.exe as I'm sure that should not be there?

    Cheers, Rob.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. PS. Just done a bit more reading and maybe pnamain.exe and receiver.exe are supposed to be running with v3.1.

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
  4. Hey Rob, I thought the same thing however if you do a clean install and drop the ram down to 512mb or even 256 it does reproduce the error. I find that very strange since the 12.1 online plugin was never installed.

    I'm not in the process of using SCCM to downgrade all systems. Still waiting to hear from Citrix.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've had the same problem here with version 3.0 and 3.1.

    The only fix i've tried that seem to work is to install Citrix Reciever without the Reciever-part (This is probably not supported by Citrix)
    Found that fix in this thread: http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=292642&start=0&tstart=0

    BTW: the latest fix proposed here (SeamlessFlag) is to prevent applications on the terminalserver from displaying icons in the tray area. So, I don't think it is at all related to this problem.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks Jarle,

    Yeah I did read about the SeamlessFlag. It may help others.

    I'm still working with Citrix Support. I've been sending logs for about a week now.

    In the meantime I had to make a solution to downgrade all clients. so I made this http://blair-muller.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/how-to-downgrade-your-citrix-client.html

    A lot of work.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Version 3.2 has been released but we're having trouble with switching back to full-screen desktop sessions when the XenApp window has been minimised for a while.

    ReplyDelete
  8. So I guess what I'm saying is "buyer beware". Will see if this fixes the core problem reported here (which happens on my work PC) when I upgrade that but not before taking an image.

    ReplyDelete