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Everyday Windows Desktop Support, Advanced Troubleshooting & Other OS Tidbits

Archive for August, 2012

Crashing Terminal Session with Latest Citrix Receiver

Posted by William Diaz on August 17, 2012


After installing the latest Citrix Receiver 3.3, one of our techs began to experience crashes of their terminal sessions after about 1-2 minutes. I connected to my lab and installed the latest Citrix Receiver and was able to reproduce. In my case, the following error was generated: “WFICA32.EXE – Application Error. The exception Breakpoint. A breakpoint has been reached…”

CitrixReceiverErr

An error may not always be produced, though, on the desktop. If you examine the Windows Event Viewer > Application logs you should see some type of error, either in the Visual C++ Runtime 2005 or in the actual Citrix module where the fault is being encountered in. For example:

Faulting application wfica32.exe, version 13.1.201.3, faulting module msvcr80.dll, version 8.0.50727.6195, fault address 0x0001574d.

 

Faulting application wfica32.exe, version 13.3.0.55, faulting module vd3dn.dll, version 13.3.0.55, fault address 0x00001021

 

After a little research, the most common culprit seems to be caused by printers that the workstation (XP SP3) cannot resolve to. These often have a status of “Unable to connect” and\or “Printer not found on server”:

image

After removing the offline printers on both the lab and the tech’s workstation, the issue went away. That being said, it might be more practical to downgrade to an earlier version of the Citrix Receiver. It’s not uncommon for network printers to be taken offline in large enterprises or decommissioned. Worse, imagine mobile users who will show all network printers as unable to connect when outside the network and trying to connect remotely to their virtual desktops. This seems specific to only Windows XP clients.

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Update

I ran into this again today issue where this was happening on a user workstation even after the disconnected printers were removed. Crash dumps pointed to hpcui6dn.dll. Using the Windows local print server on the workstation, we could see that the print driver belonged to one the disconnected printers. Apparently, an “orphaned” print driver could cause the problem as well. Resolving was a simple matter of stopping and restarting the print spooler and from the local print server properties selecting Remove for the printer driver that was no longer connected.

Application exception occurred:
        App: C:\PROGRA~1\Citrix\ICACLI~1\WFICA32.EXE (pid=6104)
        When: 12/26/2012 @ 10:57:07.919
        Exception number: c0000005 (access violation)

…

FAULT ->35257cb2 c4b3029b1db1  les esi,[ebx+0xb11d9b02] ds:0023:b130883a=????????????
        35257cb8 758e             jnz     hpcui6dn+0x157c48 (35257c48)
        35257cba b0f7             mov     al,0xf7
        35257cbc 4f               dec     edi
        35257cbd ad               lodsd
        35257cbe c3               ret
        35257cbf b0b6             mov     al,0xb6
        35257cc1 b9d8812742       mov     ecx,0x422781d8
        35257cc6 852c83           test    [ebx+eax*4],ebp
        35257cc9 3aab84ce5fa5     cmp     ch,[ebx+0xa55fce84]
        35257ccf 5c               pop     esp

*—-> Stack Back Trace <—-*
WARNING: Stack unwind information not available. Following frames may be wrong.
ChildEBP RetAddr  Args to Child             
0012ec39 cf351cdd 1c932e1e 90069193 ff3531b3 hpcui6dn+0x157cb2
140012ec 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 0xcf351cdd
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The Case of the Slowly Opening Or Unresponsive Office Files

Posted by William Diaz on August 15, 2012


After a recent security update for our XP workstations, a couple complaints came in where user’s were having difficulty opening Microsoft Office files across the network. In some cases, the file would open, but only after a delay of a few minutes. In other cases, the file would not open at all, causing the Office application (Word, Excel) to become unresponsive and hung up. The files were not ridiculously large, and opening the same files locally did not present a problem. Identifying the cause was a simple matter of turning to Process Explorer and examining the stack of the working program thread:

image

You can see the stack growing with a couple dozen calls to some component named GKExcel.dll. Turning on the Lower Pane to view DLLs (View > Lower Pane View > DLLs), I can see it is described as Microsoft Component, but the description is too generic to make out the purpose:

image

However, one of the functions may allude to what its purpose is and how it got here. Searching FValidateExcelFile takes me to this MS KB article Excel workbooks may open slowly over the network:

After you install MS11-021 and the Office File Validation (OFV) Add-in for Microsoft Office 2003 (KB 2501584), workbooks stored in a network location open more slowly over the network in Excel 2003 than they did without the OFV installed. The decrease in performance depends on the size of the workbook and bandwidth of the network, and in some scenarios, can seem to cause Excel to crash.

The issue is not specific to Excel, however. Word files were taking several minutes to open as well. Resolving is a simple matter of uninstalling the Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in or modifying the registry to make an exception for the application opening the file. To do this:

  • Go to HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\<ver>\<application>\Security.
  • Create a new key called FileValidation
  • Create a DWORD value called EnableOnLoad with a value of 0

If uninstalling across the enterprise, then: msiexec / x {90140000-2005-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE} / quiet.

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