Just my experience with complex Apps and App capture process:
- Most Applications, you install them in the App Capture process, launch them, ensure it works, might want to make some changes to the default settings that get captured with the AppStack and it works out of the box.
- There are other Applications like Bloomberg requires that a certain component/settings to not get captured during the install n capture of an AppStack. This was a for a Floating VDI environment, we successfully installed and captured the Bloomberg application, but didn't launch the app after it was installed (to ensure the "capturing" user account did not imprint any registration settings that should not get saved in the AppStack.). We then assigned the AppStack to a floating VDI environment, uses had their Writable Volumes. Launched Bloomberg for the "First time" and user registration was completed successfully and was captured in the Writable Volumes. The same user logged off and back into another VM in the Floating Pool and didn't have to register Bloomberg again. We later users the earlier User Environment Manager (now DEM) to capture Bloomberg settings as well.
- There are the 3rd kind of applications that when launches look for its Installer MSI to pull in registration/initial launch files which sometimes sits in the C:\Windows\Installer (if the Software is Packaged properly in the first place, other simpler packages use the user's local profile as a TEMP location to store the MSI file and delete it after installation)
- You might want to install Passwordsafe on a regular VM (without AppStack), log in with another user and check if its looking for the MSI and validate if this is an acceptable behavior, look for registry values to see where the MSI being referenced is stored (if that is being Excluded in the AppStack Capture / Closure process), if the MSI can be stored somewhere else being captured within the AppStack and modify the Registry...
in short with there is a lot of variables that goes into the installation and post-install tasks before and after launch for a First time and recurring experience that needs to be validated in a VM without AppStack and then with the AppStack (validating the sysvol.cfg file in the AppStack that has your inclusion and exclusion rules of what to and not to capture).
