Citrix Apps slow to launch after home drive move

I recently moved everyone’s U:\ drives from an old crappy ‘NAS’ device…it was setup with 4 disks in RAID5- in the OS…needless to say software RAID5 tends to lead to terrible disk performance…especially when the processor is only a 3.0G P4. The shares are now on a file server VM with TONS of resources, and things are already better. I finally got around to re-configuring the old NAS into something a little more useful – the SATA card was capable of hardware RAID1, so I made 2 logical drives, and put Server 2008 (no R2 – not x64 capable) on there – it was previously 2003 Appliance Edition…I’m sure this isn’t supported, but it’s out of warrantee anyway.

To follow the naming convension, I did NOT name it something like what it was previously (mothership…..uuggghh.) When I had this done, several people noted things being slow. The first was workstations hanging up at “Applying user settings” for quite some time. The remedy to this was in the registry – I’m not sure why, but there were a few things in some (not all) profiles that were still pointing at the old U: drive path – \\<servername>\path… instead of U:\path. Keep in mind that the AppData and MyDocs folders are redirected to the home directory as well…Once these were changed, all was well…sort of.

Then some people were having issues launching Citrix apps- there were no errors, it would just hang up with the UI saying ‘Launching – Preparing to connect…’. I ran several procmon traces to no avail…I could see the systems trying to connect out to the old server, but it wasn’t helping me figure out what was doing it.

Then I happened to log on to one of my test systems and try it out – this system happens to have an older version of the Online Plugin (ICA Client). Then I got an error –

wfcrun32 Error
Failed to Set Event Logging.

That was it! Now I knew what the issue was – and there is actually a CTX KB article on it: CTX118553:

This occurs if the user’s profile was moved after the XenApp plugin was installed. The log file path in the Users Appsrv.ini is incorrect. Uninstalling and reinstalling does not correct the issue.

The APPSRV.INI file is located in the AppData directory under ICAClient. Here is where I found the entries for the old server hard coded as opposed to using the network drive, or the default variable path- keep in mind too that only some were like this. Some were pointing correctly – C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\… which works fine because folder redirect picks up the new location. I wrote a fix into the logon script to fix this, and all is well.

 

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