VMware Horizon Community
Marc87
Contributor
Contributor

Problem with explorer.exe under Windows 10

Hello,

we are using a floating Pool in Horizon 7.10 for our users. The Image based on Windows 10 1903 and we have some issues with the linked clones.

The Windows start menu is sometimes broken, so that some application do not show up and only a few standard Windosapps are available in the menu. Additional to that some cmd commads in scripts dosen't work properly, so that some scripts exit with no error, when the commands where run direkt in a cmd window all work fine. Another problem is, that the standard network printer change after the user where logout or dosen't work correctly and the user must delete the printer and reconnect it. All of these problems only effect the linked clones and not the masterimage.

We search for a solution and find out, that a restart of the explorer.exe with the taskmanager help, the start menu now show up correct and the commands in the scripts work fine. So we try to kill and restart the explorer task at the login but this dosn't effect any of the problems like the restart with the taskmanager.

Have anyone similar problems or maybe a solution?

Thanks

Marc

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3 Replies
zhornsby
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have had this issue also. Any help is much appreciated!

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Marc87
Contributor
Contributor

Any solutions ?

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hschimpf
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The underlying issue with the printers is that Windows was designed for home use. When you log in to Windows for the first time, it will initialize all the apps and "hardware" for your and set up your user account. I'm guessing that you are using UEM/DEM to save and restore your user data. When this is done, it can happen that UEM/DEM imports your archives "too early" and that Windows will overwrite these settings during initialization. I have done a lot of experimenting with the printers but could never get a consistent result. Currently we are running a script that delays for a minute and then imports the printers again. This seems to be somewhat consistent however the default printer changing is still a problem sometimes.

We use instant-clones so I'm not sure how they are different to linked-clones but I would guess that you are having the same issue in that regard. The broken start menu might have the same issue. The layout of the start menu is stored in a database in Windows so when you log in, this gets created for your new user. If the creation takes too long and UEM/DEM overwrites the file while it is still being created, it might have an impact like this. You could try and experiment with delaying the import of the start menu, or just have a fixed start menu layout that doesn't get exported through UEM/DEM.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Raetke

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