Wednesday, June 19, 2013

XenApp 6.5, Citrix UPM and Microsoft Office Errors

So a few months back, we were forced into rolling out a XenApp farm for a high priority application.  After implementation, our testing phase was immediately crippled by a chain of strange errors in Excel 2010.

Problem: The users first connection to the Citrix environment goes off without a hitch, no errors and applications work as expected.  However, once they disconnect and their profile is migrated to the UPM user store, all subsequent connections see a handful of errors and broken functionality.

Upon launching Excel, the following error would appear for any 3rd party Excel add-ins:

Microsoft Excel cannot access the file 'C:\Program Files (x86)\PATH TO ADDIN DLL', There are several possible reasons:
  • The file name or path does not exist.
  • The file is being used by another program.
  • The workbook you are trying to save has the same name as a currently open workbook
After clicking OK on the dialog boxes, everything looked good... until you clicked on File --> Save As or Open!  Nothing happens, it appears whatever was causing the issue had broken Windows Explorer functionality within Excel.

In addition, launching Windows Explorer would display the following errror:

C:\Users\Username\Desktop refers to a location that is unavailable...
And lastly, while displaying no errors at launch, Microsoft Word would exhibit the same broken functionality when trying to open or save documents and hang indefinitely when exiting.

After spending way to many hours on the phone with Citrix support trying to resolve the issue, we narrowed it down to our UPM folder inclusion/exclusion GPO causing the issue.

Resolution: Configure Windows Folder Redirection for the Desktop folder.

As it turns out, during discussions with our consultant regarding the implementation, we told him we did not want the Desktop redirected as we do not want users saving documents there.  Apparently, none of us knew of the dependencies Microsoft Office has on the Desktop folder.

Afterwards, I did a little searching and found this article:
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130329

While this was of no help during my troubleshooting(because none of my errors led to the article), there are obviously other issues that can arise when excluding the desktop folder in your UPM policy.