Changing the default search provider in IE 9

One question I get a fair bit is, can we change the default search provider for IE. This is a bit of a pain… you can do it the long MS way

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918238

or use a pre-canned copy here:

http://blogofanitadmin.blogspot.com/2011/05/group-policy-changing-default-search.html

This worked fine for me. MS should really improve this…

Adjust font size in Windows 2008 R2/XenApp

It’s seems it’s not so easy to do, however this tool will do it on a user by user basis

http://www.markprigg.com/    “ Remote Desktop Font Size Changing Tool”

download

Citrix optimisations for Windows 2008 R2 server with XenApp 6/6.5

Citrix consulting have put together a large list of tweaks to help speed up and remove some hassles from Windows 2008 R2 with XenApp

http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/12/06/optimization-guide-for-windows-server-2008r2-with-xenapp-66-5-%E2%80%93-available-now/

Complete list of Microsoft hotfixes for Windows 2008 R2 Remote desktop

Located here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2601888

Note they don’t recommend you proactively apply the patches, rather, apply on a case by case basis.

Xenapp 6 STILL hanging after deploying recommended fixes?

NLAsvc timeouts in XenApp 6? Users can’t log in? users can’t log out? CryptSvc service timeouts?

“The winlogon notification subscriber <Sens> is taking long time to handle the notification event (Logoff)” messages?

Take a look at this hotfix http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129741

contains many fixes in one package. However, applying this hotfix alone will not sort out the hanging issues.

You should also follow this step:

—

7. A session can be terminated before the first application launches. The issue can occur when a one-minute time-out is exceeded, for example, when the profile share is located across a WAN link rather than on a local share.

This fix introduces support for the following registry key that allows you to configure the time-out as follows:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI
Name: ApplicationLaunchWaitTimeoutMS
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: <desired additional time-out, in milliseconds>

Note: Specifying a value of less than 10000 reverts to 10000 because 10 seconds is the minimum override.

—-

In this case, I was instructed to increase the value up to 300000 by support, and have not had any further hanging issues in xenapp 6/remote desktop since. Hurrah!

Office 20XX applications crashing in Xenapp6? clipboard may be to blame…

A problem I’ve seen was office applications crashing in xenapp 6 which runs on windows 2008 R2…

Nothing seemed to work, and the office apps were crashing with a seemingly random list of causes, even excluding DEP on the office binaries didn’t work.

After a bit of debugs with Microsoft they gave me a private fix for what looked to be a clipboard issue. The private hotfix worked, and will be released on the 15th/16th of June.

For those of you having issues with office apps (and maybe others crashing) on Xenapp6 or R2 this may help.

Article name is 2541119 and KB article (at the time of writing is not yet up on the MS site) will be here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-US;2541119

Update this is now out:

Some applications may crash on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. This issue usually occurs when you use the following applications:

• Windows Explorer
• Microsoft Office applications
• Windows Movie Maker

CAUSE

This issue occurs because of a known issue in Ole32.dll. When certain applications implement the IEnumFORMATETC interface but do not implement the IEnumFORMATETC::Next() function correctly, Ole32.dll adds a malformed data structure to the system clipboard. When another process queries the Clipboard later, the processes may receive this malformed data structure. Therefore, heap corruption occurs in this process.