topic Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment. in Dynamic Environment Manager

FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

Pim_van_de_Vis — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 18:10:55 GMT

Roaming the Start Menu layout, including all personalized tiles is still very hard to accomplish. The Start Menu in Windows 10 was stored in a database which was locked and could not be copied.

With the Microsoft released Windows 10 version 1703 Creators Update, the Start Menu is no longer stored in a database, but stored in the registry. This makes it possible to roam the Start Menu again.

This article explains how to roam the Start menu layout by using VMware User Environment Manager.

Note: This solution only works on Windows 10 version 1703 or later.

To allow users to personalize their Windows 10 Start Menu and roam those personal settings, a new UEM Configuration item needs to be created using the UEM Management Console:

Click Create Config File and select Create a custom config file and give it a name.
On the Import/Export tab, paste these two lines:
- [IncludeRegistryTrees]
- HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CloudStore
Save the UEM Config file.

You can now customize and personalize your Start Menu, including pinning tiles to local apps, modern AppX apps, group tiles, resize, and re-order.

Note: Roaming the Start Menu with this approach even allows for roaming between 32-bit and 64-bit.

Also see this KB I just created:

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2150422

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

ijdemes — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 19:34:10 GMT

This is freakin' AWESOME !!

Just gave it a spin, and it works just perfectly.

Thanks for sharing Pim !!

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

SummaCollege — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 07:34:58 GMT

We implemented this configuration on Windows 10 v1703 in VMWare Horizon 7 with UEM v9.2.0.

Startmenu Import/Export

[IncludeRegistryTrees]
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CloudStore

Our Golden Image still has the default startmenu layout. No customisation yet. We first want roaming to function reliable.

Our test results are not good.

Steps:

1) Login on the machine

2) Redesign the startmenu to fit my needs. For example, grouping Office apps and browsers.

3) Logoff or shutdown the machine

4) Logon again. Doesn't seem to make a difference if we get assigned the same machine or a different one from the pool.

5) Sometimes the startmenu is just like we redesigned it in step 2. About the same number of tries the startmenu is almost empty. Only the Edge icon plus maby one other icon is present, the other icons are missing.

6) Logoff or shutdown

7) Subsequent logons to other machines result in showing the almost empty startmenu again. Most likely the almost empty startmenu from step 5 is saved by logoff in step 7

The inconsistent results is whats bothering us and we can't figure out why. Logging shows no errors and the Startmenu.zip file in the archive containes the correct regfile.

Edit:

My colleague mentions that she noticed that often after starting the machine and when the desktop is shown, at first the startmenu is as default. Only after waiting for a while (about 30 sec) the redesigned startmenu is loaded. Also when this is happening, sometimes the startmenu is shown correctly and sometimes it is not.

Edit2:

We also noticed that when the startmenu is not correct, also all shortcuts to installed apps and desktop programs are missing. Only the default builtin windows apps are present in the startmenu. For example the UEM Refresh shortcut is missing, but tapping the Windows-flag key and searching for "Refresh" does find it. Also when running the UEM Refresh, the startmenu is appearing as we would expect and all seems ok. Looks like we need to check the UEM Refresh on logon.

Edit3:

Running a refresh after logon and we get back all tiles, only the positions are incorrect. The tile placement is completely wrong.

This is not a solution we would like to present to our users (about 15000)

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

Pim_van_de_Vis — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 13:29:40 GMT

Can you try with this UEM Config File?

I've added some additional locations that show better results for some customers. Please let me know the results of your testing.

===

[IncludeRegistryTrees]

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CloudStore

[IncludeIndividualRegistryValues]

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\SlowContextMenuEntries

[IncludeFolderTrees]

<LocalAppData>\microsoft\windows\caches

===

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

SummaCollege — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 14:23:04 GMT

Thanks for the info! We implemented this and first reactions are positive, but we will give this more time to test.

Thx,

Joris

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

raybarth — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 22:43:14 GMT

That's great news! I look forward to trying it out. Now if VMware would only certify 1703 as a supported version we could move forward with it. Maybe discoveries like this will put some pressure on.

Supported versions of Windows 10 on Horizon 7 Including All VDI Clones (Full Clones, Linked Clones, Instant Clones) (214…

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

Raymond_W — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 13:30:08 GMT

As soon Windows 1703 CBB will come out (expected August 2017) it will be tested and, if everything is OK, supported by VMware.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

ecull — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 17:53:21 GMT

Thanks for all of your hard work on this Pim. We pushed your team pretty hard on this one since around Christmas 2016.

Confirmed working now in our Horizon 7.2.0 build with W10 1607 LTSB and UEM 9.2.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

jmatz135 — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 19:04:26 GMT

When I have Windows 10 1703 and UEM running, possibly with just certain settings, haven't narrowed down what exactly is causing the issue, when I open the start menu the COM Surrogate process goes up to 100% on one of the CPUs and makes things pretty slow and obviously uses a lot of resources. Anyone have any ideas as to what might be cause this?

Windows 10 1703

View Agent 7.2

UEM 9.2

App Volumes 2.12.1

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

DEMdev — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 21:54:28 GMT

Hi jmatz135,

Can you try adding dllhost.exe to the DirectFlex blacklist? To configure this, create a Blacklist.xml file in the ...\General\FlexRepository\DirectFlex folder (which does not exist by default), with the following content:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>

</userEnvironmentSettings>

If you already have this Blacklist.xml file, just update its list attribute by adding |dllhost.exe at the end of the current value (note the '|' (pipe character), which acts as a separator).

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

WTopping — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 23:02:45 GMT

I am seeing this exact same issue in an environment I am working in. I have verified the issue only happens when the UEM agent is installed. I have also tried to disable all WIndows settings from applying but still no luck.

Wes

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

jmatz135 — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 23:49:42 GMT

Creating the Blacklist.xml file with dllhost.exe in the list worked for me so now I don't have the issue with the processor pegging to 100%.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

WTopping — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 15:37:01 GMT

This also worked for us. Will there be a KB article on this issue?

Wes

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

DEMdev — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 17:34:31 GMT

Glad to hear this fixed the issue for you, WTopping and jmatz135! Thank you for letting us know.

I'll try to get a KB created for this.

20170913 UPDATE: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2151201 has been created for this issue. Also, the next release of UEM contains a fix for this.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

QCBenPetersen — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:07:36 GMT

I am very new to UEM, and I am not understanding how to create this. I am having the same issues as described.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

QCBenPetersen — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:12:15 GMT

I might have figured it out by plucking around.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

DEMdev — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 22:17:12 GMT

Hi QCBenPetersen,

I might have figured it out by plucking around

Great! And if you do run into problems with this, just let us know here on the forum.

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

Pim_van_de_Vis — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 07:49:06 GMT

This KB also describes the steps:

How to roam Windows 10 Start Menu layout (2150422)

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2150422

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

michael_borland — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:46:57 GMT

Will this work in UEM 9.1 or just 9.2?

Re: FIXED! Roam the Windows 10 Start Menu in your VDI environment.

ijdemes — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:51:02 GMT

This works regardless of the UEM version. Both 9.1 and 9.2 work. It's just a matter of exporting/importing registry and folders.