Strange Problems With Your TS clients? Maybe It's How The Client Was Installed.

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If the SoftGrid Terminal Server Client is installed though a normal Terminal Server session it is possible that you may experience inconsistent, confusing and very hard to troubleshoot problems. The SoftGrid Terminal Server Client needs to be installed on Console ID 0 so if you’re seeing strange problems and are in doubt as to how the client was installed, it’s probably a good idea to go ahead and uninstall and reinstall it either at the Server’s Console or by using the “mstsc /console” command.

The following scenario is from a customer call I received and may give you an idea of some of the issues you might encounter if the SoftGrid Terminal Server Client is not installed correctly:

A customer called up saying that he had a Windows 2003 R2 based Citrix farm with several SoftGrid Terminal Server 4.1.1.302 clients. He did not install the SoftGrid environment himself and was not sure how it was configured, nor was he sure how the SoftGrid clients were installed.

The problem was that only one of the Citrix SoftGrid clients appeared to work properly. On one server the permissions tab didn't reflect the default configuration, and on another it would only launch three out of the four SoftGrid applications. On top of that, it didn’t show the Office 2003 package in the SoftGrid Applications menu although the configuration settings on the Virtual Application Server (VAS) suggested it should be there. When we attempted to launch the application via the OSD in the content share we got errors like 00001004 and 20000193.

As a troubleshooting step we tried installing the SoftGrid Desktop Client on a Windows XP workstation and sure enough everything worked properly. This told us there was some sort of issue with the clients on these Citrix boxes so we decided to uninstall and reinstall the SoftGrid TS Client using the physical console of the server and sure enough that resolved our issue.

Looking back on this, I suspect that one way to get around reinstalling the client might be to select all the permissions check boxes on the permissions tab of the SoftGrid Client Management Console. I believe that this is why the one Citrix server was working as whoever did the initial install may have worked around the issue by manually modifying the Client permissions.

John Behneman