Excluding system services for Windows 10 1607 with random names

[szilagyic]

Hello:

We are just starting our Windows 10 deployment which uses Writable Volumes.  I have discovered that Windows 10 has a list of services that are created on the fly with a random string of text at the end of them, which appear to be captured by the Writable Volume and saved.  What is happening is the list of system services is slowly building up, generating a huge list of system services and eventually the Services control panel will no longer open, and will throw the error "Error 1783: The stub received bad data".  In looking in the registry under the location HKEY_Local_Machine\System\ControlSet001\Services, it has slowly built up a huge list of duplicate services and in the Windows logs shows that it tries to start them all and is erroring out.  I believe this is also causing a significant logon delay as well.

I've tried to add the lines to snapvol.cfg near the existing section that excludes these system services for Windows. For some reason, they are not already in the default snapvol.cfg with App Volumes 2.12.  However, since Windows is creating these services with a random string of text at the end of them, I'm not sure how to do this using a wildcard.  Here's an example of what I'm trying to add:

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\CDPUserSvc*

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\MessagingService*

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\OneSyncSvc*

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\PimIndexMaintenanceSvc*

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\UnistoreSvc*

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\UserDataSvc*

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\WpnUserService*

How can I add these and have it use wildcards for these service names?  I am hoping there is a way to do this.  This is a huge problem that seems to be new with Windows 10 1607.

Thanks in advance.

[pbylina]

We are experiencing the exact same issue. We tried going to the registry for each of the services you listed and changing the Start value from 2 to 4 so that any uniquely hashed services that get created don't automatically start. We also deleted people's writables and gave them fresh ones to get rid of hundreds of duplicate services.

We're in a better state now that all the duplicate services aren't running. But they're still piling up on the writable. I think this is also correlated to folks getting a black screen as soon as they connect to their VM.

Windows 10, 1607

App Volumes 2.12

Horizon 7.0.3

[szilagyic]

I believe the entries below have fixed the issue with the services getting captured in the Writable Volumes.

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\CDPUserSvc_
exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\MessagingService_
exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\OneSyncSvc_
exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\PimIndexMaintenanceSvc_
exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\UnistoreSvc_
exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\UserDataSvc_
exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\WpnUserService_

Hopefully this helps others having the same issue.

I still have some duplicates however when looking at the service list in Windows but it doesn't seem to be building up as quick as it was before.

[pbylina]

Yes, I believe that an upgrade to AppVols 2.12.1 includes those exclusions. The duplicate services are no longer being saved to the writables.

We did have to write a PS script to loop through the registry and delete existing services that had already accrued on people's writables. This was a better solution for us than deleting and recreating the writables.