Friday 12 November 2010

Publishing explorer.exe in XenApp 6

Publishing windows explorer is something that I never thought was a good idea – but some people seem to like it!  It is to be fair a nice, simple alternative a published desktop if people want to just open their documents and then double click on a file.

Its supposed to just be a case of publishing a Hosted application shortcut to c:\windows\explorer.exe, with a parameter of the drive letter or path you want it to default to, like this to start in the h: drive:

image

It should be that simple.  But it isn’t.  By default this will only stay open if there is another program keeping the session open – if it is launched first (which it would be, logically) it closes after an instant. 

There is a registry fix from Citrix support though for this, which I found on this forum post: http://forums.citrix.com/message.jspa?messageID=1461520.

Create a DWORD (32 bit) setting called LogoffCheckerStartupDelayInSeconds with the value 10 at this location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI

If you want a reg file to just import to fix this, copy the following text into a text file and save it with a .reg extension:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI]
"LogoffCheckerStartupDelayInSeconds"=dword:00000010

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reg key only works on Thick clients and not Iphone or Ipad... I don't know why but Citrix really needs to fix this...

Anonymous said...

Thx - Solved my problem :-)

Bento said...

For mobile clients to work you must disable drive mapping.

Anonymous said...

I have published Windows Explore in XenAPP 6. At this server I have installed Office 2010.
I have tested copying files (size about 7MB) in a XenAPP 6 server with the last fix, Windows 2008 R2 with and without SP1 and with Office 2010 with and without SP1.
Copying files from client drives to server file inside the Citrix session is very slow in a wan connection. If I use remote desktop session, copying files is fast.
Have you seen this issue?. Do you know how to resolve it?
Thanks
Joaquín.

Anonymous said...

Worked great for me THANKS

Anonymous said...

Just use Citrix Doc finder instead for mobile devices.

http://community.citrix.com/display/xa/Citrix+Doc+Finder

Anonymous said...

thank you, excellent instruction on setting up Explorer on Xenapp!!

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