New KB: Common dialogs fail to open in applications sequenced with Microsoft App-V

Article
09/12/2011

Here’s a new App-V Knowledge Base article we published this morning. If you’re seeing an issue where dialog boxes fail to open with a virtualized app then you’ll want to check this one out:

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Symptoms

Common dialogs such as File \ Open, Save, or Save-As... fail to open in applications sequenced in App-V 4.5 or 4.6. No errors are reported, but clicking on the menu appears to have no effect.

Cause

This is caused if Entrust Group Share (Entrust Entelligence Group Share for Windows Folders 2.30) is installed on a client that is also running App-V 4.6 SP1. Previous versions of App-V do not exhibit this behavior.

Resolution

This behavior is resolved in Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 4.6 SP1 Hotfix 4 (HF04). You can request this update by contacting Microsoft Support.

As a workaround, you can edit the OSD for affected applications to set the SXS_32_ENABLED tag to true. This has the side-effect of bypassing side-by-side assemblies located in the package itself and using only locally installed binaries. This may result in missing files unless the assemblies are installed on the client computer.

To change this setting, open the OSD file for the application and modify the policies section to include the SXS_32_ENABLED tag set to true (the default value is false). This should generally be avoided, as it necessitates that all side-by-side assemblies be installed locally on the machine. For example:

<LOCAL_INTERACTION_ALLOWED>FALSE</LOCAL_INTERACTION_ALLOWED>

<SXS_32_ENABLED>TRUE</SXS_32_ENABLED>

</POLICIES>

More Information

A Procmon will reveal entries like this where the volume name is prepended twice to the path:

4:05:26.2364763 PM notepad.exe 3264 CreateFile \Device\eedmk{3378b50c-cda0-11e0-b722-806e6f6e6963}\Device\eedmk{3378b50c-cda0-11e0-b722-806e6f6e6963}\Windows\System32\uxtheme.dll SUCCESS Desired Access: Generic Read, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Non-Directory File, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Delete, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened

Other, generic errors may also be seen as a result of trying to locate Side-By-Side assemblies (SxS assemblies) in the wrong path. For example, Notepad will fail on file\open... with:
Not enough memory available to complete this operation. Quit one or more applications to increase available memory, and then try again.

The presence of the 'double path' is diagnostic.

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For the most current version of this article please see the following:

2591554: Common dialogs fail to open in applications sequenced with Microsoft App-V

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

New KB: Common dialogs fail to open in applications sequenced with Microsoft App-V

Symptoms

Cause

Resolution

More Information

Additional resources