VMware Horizon Community
admum
Contributor
Contributor

Windows Explorer.exe stops

I have two pools that are linked to clones.

When users log into Pool A everything seems to be working fine.

When they log out of Pool A and connect to Pool B

The system starts with welcome screen and then goes black.

A message will appear saying exeplore.exe has stopped. Another appears saying explorer.exe can not start.

If the user logs back into Pool A, the system will work fine.

I can access task manager and try to start explorer.exe manually but it will not start.

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11 Replies
mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

Are Pool A and Pool B based on the same image? 

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admum
Contributor
Contributor

No, one image has the addition of Java 6

the first Images has Java 7.

The difference in the Pools is one has a persistent disk.

The problem is that the Pool with the persistent disk is corupting the roaming profile.

out of the six users, one I was able to free but no luck on the others. I tried renaming the v2 profile file but that only worked on one user.

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DXSMATT
Contributor
Contributor

Did you ever find a resolution for this?


I seem to be having the same problem.

Initially a pool was created without persistent disks.  That template was then cloned to make a second pool, but persistent disks were enabled.

Now it appears that explorer.exe is not starting on pool a for users entitled to both pools.

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jcosta
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Anybody figure this out?  I have the opposite problem.  Pool A and B based off the same image but different snap shots.  Pool A is with persistent disks and works fine but Pool B is with non-persistent Disks and gives me a black screen.  I can ctrl-alt-del and get task manager but if I try to start explorer.exe I get nothing.  I can browse C drive through task manager and evev launch mmc stuff but can't get explorer to run.

I am running view persona on the users.

Thanks,

J

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h3nkY
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Can you please specify View agent version?

Can you verify what you see on the screen of the desktop where user logged off? Just to verify logoff process is already done or not.

Which View client do you use?

What is connection protocol do you use, PCoIP or RDP?

Do you use tunneling?

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jcosta
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Well it is happening again.  I have a linked clone desktop pool with persistent hard drives and using view persona to redirect my documents, favorites and desktops.  This works great!

I created a dedicated pool to assign some users dedicated non linked clone machines.  Created the machines using the view connection server and picked a template.  Logged into the machine as admin and joined it to the domain.

Restarted it a few times and logged in as a user and I get a completely blue background.  The color of the desktop.

It responds to ctlr-alt-del and can browse the C drive including computer management but can't get explorer to run.

I am running ESX 6, Vcenter 6, VComposer 6 and the agent is 6.2.1-3284564

How should I start to trouble shoot this?  Doesn't matter if I login with the view client PCoIP, HTML or directly to the console.  Same results.

Thanks,

J

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h3nkY
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

In case your windows shell can't run and you just see windows background, I suspect there is "something" blocks login process to continue.

The only way came in to my mind to troubleshoot this issue is by looking at desktop memory dump. Here are the steps to take memory dump.

1. Take the problematic desktop to maintenance mode using View Admin UI when you see windows background after couple of minutes (i.e. 3 minutes).

2. Suspend the VM using vSphere client.

3. You'll find *.vmss (in some version you'll see *.vmem as well) in the same datastore as VM and copy it.

4. Zip it and upload it here.

I'll quick look what is happening in you desktop.

Thanks.

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jcosta
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks h3nkY but I dropped back and punted!  I rebuilt my windows 7 image from scratch...installed all updates and used the new version of the optimize tool and after building a dedicated image with that persona management seemed to start working again.

Folder redirection and roaming profiles all work.  I did narrow it down to the roaming profiles setting in view persona...the minute I disabled that in GPO it would load fine.  I went through every log and even ran file monitor but couldn't figure it out.

Thanks for the help!

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locutus_007
Contributor
Contributor

I had this same issue. In my case, my persona worked fine on either pool, but after I logged on once to the persistent pool I could no longer get onto the non-persistent pool (without waiting for 5 minutes and then manually running explorer.exe from task manager). Removal of registry branch "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CD Burning\StagingInfo" corrected the black screen issue for me

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jcosta
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Wow ok!  I will have to try that next time it happens.  I am sure it will because I have had it happen on multiple client systems.

How did you figure out to remove that reg key?

Later,

J

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locutus_007
Contributor
Contributor

 

Nice little fix for me, hope it works for you! I had the help of VMware tech support (I believe it was Ismael Cervantes), they collected logs and checked into it and found I had a CD drive in by base image. After that they were pretty sure it was my CD burning cache, and they were right in my case.

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