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Everyday Windows Desktop Support, Advanced Troubleshooting & Other OS Tidbits

Archive for April 4th, 2012

Citrix Receiver Excessive Registry Polling?

Posted by William Diaz on April 4, 2012


While running Process Monitor on my primary workstation, I noticed repetitive registry operations coming from Citrix Receiver application on the same keys:
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How repetitive? 13,000+ registry operations per minute on my idle workstation with no active Citrix connections:
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This applies to the Windows 7 client. I don’t see the same activity for the Windows XP client.

I recalled a reading in the Windows Internals 5th Edition:

“Because the registry implements the RegNotifyChangeKey function that applications can use to request notification of registry changes without polling for them, when you launch Process Monitor on a system that’s idle you should not see repetitive accesses to the same registry keys or values. Any such activity identifies a poorly written application that unnecessarily affects a system’s overall performance.”

I don’t know the internals of the Receiver application, but this leaves me wondering if there is some room for improvement by implementing RegNotifyChangeKey to make it less “noisy”.

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Quickly Find Those File Handles part II (Remote Handles)

Posted by William Diaz on April 4, 2012


In addition to local processes locking up files and preventing their usage by other processes, files can also become locked by remote processes, too. Finding the remote system that has a handle(s) on the file can be a little bit more more involved. I mean this literally: a little a bit more involved. Knowing which tools to use or where to look can make this task just as simple as isolating it to a local process as outlined in part I.

This example is a recreation of an issue I encountered while working on a workstation remotely. It manifested itself as a failure to logon as the user: “Windows cannot load the locally stored profile…”

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Resolving Missing or Stubborn System Tray Icons

Posted by William Diaz on April 4, 2012


A co-worker asked me a question recently after a user he was talking with put him on the spot by mentioning that one of the icons in the Windows System Tray, specifically the McAfee tray icon, had gone missing. She thought something was awry and wondered if something was done overnight to her workstation to make it disappear or if we had suddenly decided to get rid of it.

Missing:
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Present:
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