Working for a customer recently I came across an issue launching published apps from the Citrix Receiver shortcut placed on the user’s published desktop. Clicking the Receiver shortcut wouldn’t launch the application and there were no errors reported anywhere! The server event logs didn’t show anything, the user’s desktop didn’t throw up any messages or actually show anything at all. This is something that I’ve had working at other customer sites stretching back years so I know I’m not asking for anything out of the ordinary.
After a lot of troubleshooting, installing various versions of Citrix Receiver and applying Citrix updates with no luck I had to make the call to Citrix support. After 4 hours on the phone troubleshooting, Citrix support informed me Citrix Receiver isn’t meant to launch applications that reside on the same server as the published desktop I’m currently using and that its meant to access applications that reside on other servers! “Ok, thank you for your help. Leave it with me and I’ll keep you posted on how I go”.
Something got me thinking about User Folder redirection and that the user’s AppData folder was being redirected to a file server somewhere on the network. Folder redirection was enabled to save the user’s data and make it available to any Citrix XenApp server they may log into within the Citrix farm. Looking at the GPO policy, I disabled redirecting this folder and left it to Citrix UPM to handle what data will be saved and discarded for the users. Presto – launching published apps from the Receiver shortcut worked like a charm and Citrix UPM is doing its thing managing the user’s profile. Sometimes we can over complicate Citrix configurations to our detriment where simpler setups are all we need!
