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szilagyic
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AppVol 2.14.2 breaks Chrome in AppStacks

Hello:

After upgrading to AppVol 2.14.2, it appears it has broken Chrome when it is deployed as an AppStack.  I have confirmed the issue has nothing to do with Writable Volumes as it happens with users that do not have a Writable.  It also happens with a brand new user and profile.  Now when opening Chrome, the user gets an "untitled" tab with a sad face and no sites can be loaded, it just brings up a gray screen.  The only way to get Chrome to run is to add the parameter "-no-sandbox" to the run line for chrome.exe.  Then it will run and perform correctly, despite the warning.  Has anybody else seen this issue?  I have searched and this seems to be a common problem with Chrome.  I've tried the usual fixes such as deleting all cache/cookies/etc, restoring defaults, disabling all extensions, removing the google folder under AppData for the user, but none of those solutions seem to work.  It doesn't appear to have anything to do with the user or the profile data, but an issue with the AppStack.

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Thanks in advance.

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hermanc01
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Try removing the chrome.exe line from the following registry key on your parent image and see if that fixes it.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\svdriver\Parameters\HookInjectionWhitelist

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hermanc01
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Try removing the chrome.exe line from the following registry key on your parent image and see if that fixes it.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\svdriver\Parameters\HookInjectionWhitelist

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szilagyic
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Try removing the chrome.exe line from the following registry key on your parent image and see if that fixes it.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\svdriver\Parameters\HookInjectionWhitelist

That worked.  I tried to research more on the HookInjectionWhiteList key itself, not sure what that does, haven't found much on it. Thank you!

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hermanc01
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I too was curious what it's used for and couldn't find anything about it so I ended up asking support.  Below is what they told me.

In specific to particular string "HookInjectionWhitelist" in svdriver\Parameters registry, below is the information provided by our engineering team.

"AppVolumes driver uses reparse technique to redirect every file access request to their respective appstack/writable. There are few applications which perform integrity checks on the opened file handle. Integrity check means, an application opens a file and gets the handle and then it queries for the path from the handle and compares them. In case of AppVolumes, both the paths are different and integrity check fails. This is where hook was introduced to fake paths returned to satisfy the Integrity check.

HookInjectionWhitelist is used to make sure that we do not inject ourselves to every process, instead to only inject to processes which perform some sort of integrity check."

Essentially what it sounds like to me is, any process in the registry key won't be executed from an appstack/writable with the svdriver touching it. Which is bad if you have Chrome in an appstack.

I've had to remove other processes from the registry key (i.e. Java) in order to get other applications to work when within an appstack as well.

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szilagyic
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Thank you for this info.  That's good to know and makes no sense why chrome.exe would be in there.  We are also having issues with Windows explorer being very slow in some cases for some users and a couple of Office 2016 issues now.  I noticed explorer.exe is in that key however I'm guessing that should stay there since it is a Windows executable and should not be included in an AppStack or Writable.  Still looking at that issue and may post it in a separate thread.

Thank you!

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hermanc01
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Do you have the scanner redirection enabled in the Horizon Agent?

If so you may want to try this, Re: [AV 2.14.X] (File) Explorer is crashing

Ignore my comment below the in there, I was having one of those PEBKAC days Smiley Happy

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szilagyic
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We have scanner redirection disabled on the image (not installed).  I believe I did see that post.  Thanks!

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