First posted to MSDN on Mar, 17 2011
Every now and then, I run into a customer situation where the ACT data collection agent causes an application on the desktop to stop working correctly. This happens because the compatibility evaluators in ACT use shims to collect this data, and some applications do not behave correctly when shimmed.
In the past, I have just recommended that the customer don’t use compatibility evaluators in that case, in order to avoid that challenge. They can still collect inventory (that doesn’t affect applications like compatibility evaluators would), and the data from compatibility evaluators, while potentially helpful, isn’t so valuable that it’s worth losing productivity.
But apparently, somewhere along the line, we added a feature which lets you exclude applications which don’t work with the compatibility evaluators:
Troubleshooting Application Failures When Running Data Collection Packages
I wasn’t even aware that we had added this feature! (I felt a little better when I later discovered that the Program Manager for ACT similarly wasn’t aware that we added this feature.)
