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Bimsquad
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App Volumes breaks AutoCAD 2019

Hi all,

Implementing a Horizon 7.6 VDI environment for some CAD users. NVIDIA GPUs, Windows 10, and vSphere 6.7u1, App Volumes 2.15, Instant Clone desktop pool.

I had spent a long time trying to package AutoDesk products into App Stacks. This was only partially successful, so we have ended up with a comprehensive base image with many AutoDesk products and versions installed.

Users have Writable Volumes, which is fantastic. It solved all our issues with keeping settings, including Office 365 logins in a non-ADFS environment.

BUT...

AutoCAD 2019 will not launch if there is ANY App Volume mounted. If there are no App Volumes present, AutoCAD works fine. The presence of any App Stack, even if it's not the writable one, causes AutoCAD to not launch.

No other AutoDesk products (several versions of Revit, Navisworks etc) exhibit the issue.

AutoCAD is the only one that wants to complete an install process when launched by each user. Without an App Volume present, this takes about 10 seconds and works fine.

With any App Volume mounted, we quickly get "The system cannot open the device or file specified". Cancelling this results in "Error 1309. Error reading from file" ... "acad.fmp" -- see attached. The file reported is present.

UAC is off. Making users local or domain admins makes no difference. The only time it launches successfully is with no App Volumes present.

I also have a packaged App Volume of AutoCAD 2019. This gets the same results.

Any ideas? I've been beating my head against this for a couple of days now. Cannot find anything meaningful in logs, but maybe there is one I don't know about.

Thanks.

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Bimsquad
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Good news. Backing out the 02-2019 update has fixed things. Windows Update disabled in the base image.

Writable Volumes with profile has taken care of the ACAD first-run setup, as well as Office 365 credentials & profiles.

Thanks for the responses!

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mrkasius
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Did you apply the Microsoft February patches ? Custom Appstack

Bimsquad
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Yes, unfortunately. It has caused no end of issues with very long boot times when snapshots are present.

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michaellynchBSD
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Hi

we have the exact same issue, the update isn't installed on the provisioning server, but it is on the gold image.

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sjesse
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The provisioning vms and gold image should be the same, not sure if this is the cause of your problems, but  you could see unexplained issues from having different patches on each.

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michaellynchBSD
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We've got it to open now, but every time someone logs in it runs through the first run setup even though they have ran it once.

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Bimsquad
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How did you get it to work? I'd be happy for it to run the user install each time.

I'm trying to back out updates now. I'll post how it goes.

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michaellynchBSD
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I removed the updated mentioned in mrkasius' post. I removed it from both the provisioning server and the gold image. I recomposed the pool with the new gold image and created the app stack on the provisioning server once the update was removed.

I have also since got UEM to import/export the app data and reg keys so it doesn't run through the first run setup each time.

Bimsquad
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Good news. Backing out the 02-2019 update has fixed things. Windows Update disabled in the base image.

Writable Volumes with profile has taken care of the ACAD first-run setup, as well as Office 365 credentials & profiles.

Thanks for the responses!

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michaellynchBSD
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I have had the same issue again with this months updates from Microsoft. I have removed KB 4489868 and it is working ok again.

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ryand32
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Question, I am running the LTSC version of Windows 10 x64 build 1803, so the February update KB article mentioned does not apply to us, but we are seeing horrible problems when using the application cooked into the base image with writable volumes, as well as just using UIA on Writable Volumes.

Is there a way to setup the Snapvol.cfg to bypass looking at other mounted appstacks, as I would still like to utilize appstacks for our other applications, as well as Autodesk Revit.

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