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Icons of unpublished/old remote apps appearing on RDWEB Page in Server 2012/2012 R2
Published Mar 16 2019 05:46 AM 17.2K Views
Microsoft
First published on TECHNET on May 05, 2015

Hello Askperf! This is Ishu Sharma from Microsoft Performance team. Today I am going to discuss a peculiar issue I came across in a couple of cases involving Server 2012 and 2012 R2. In these case, users were able to see icons for unpublished remote apps on the RDWEB page.

The remote apps, which show as actually published in the collection, can be launched. However, when you click on the icons for the apps that are not published you receive an error. Hence it was very clear that these remote apps do not actually exist but their entries are being pulled from somewhere.

In one case, I checked and confirmed that those extra remote app icons were not published in the collection. Which means, these remote app icons were being pushed from somewhere else. I used tools like procmon and RDWEB tracing while launching the app to figure out where those unpublished/old remoteapp icons are coming from. However, before doing that I checked the below registry key on the connection broker because every time a collection or remote application is published an entry for the same gets created in the below registry location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\CentralPublishedResources\PublishedFarms\CollectionName

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\CentralPublishedResources\PublishedFarms\CollectionName\Applications

I found that there was a stale entry for an old collection on the connection broker which does not exist anymore and those extra remote app icons were published for the old collection. Hence, deleting the registry entry for the old collection from connection broker resolved the issue.

In one of the cases we could also see the same thing in rdweb tracing logs ( RemoteApps go missing from RDWeb page when any of the RDSH servers are rebooted ) . It shows that icons for remote app were being written to cache from two different collections but one of the collection ( ContosStandard ) actually doesn’t exist anymore.

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Verbose] 7 Wrote icon CSMAGIC- ContosoRemoteApps -CmsRdsh into cache

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Info] 7 :App: MEDITECH WilMed Healthcare added, FileExtension: .rdp

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Verbose] 7 Wrote icon DWRCC-ContosoRemoteApps-CmsRdsh into cache

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Info] 7 :App: Dameware Remote Control added, FileExtension: .rdp

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Verbose] 7 Wrote icon EXCEL-ContosoRemoteApps-CmsRdsh into cache

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Info] 7 :App: Microsoft Excel 2010 added, FileExtension: .rdp

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Info] 7 :App: PreOP Blank added, FileExtension: .rdp

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Verbose] 7 Wrote icon mstsc- ContosoStandard -CmsRdsh into cache

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Info] 7 :App: Remote Desktop Connection added, FileExtension: .rdp

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Verbose] 7 Wrote icon powershell - ContosoStandard-CmsRdsh into cache

w3wp.exe Information 0 2014/03/05 13:45:26 [Info] 7 :App: Windows PowerShell added, FileExtension: .rdp

You may also come across cases where instead of a stale entry for old collection, you might find a stale entry for just an old remote app which is not supposed to be displayed on RDWEB page. So, in such scenarios you can verify the above registry Keys to check that no extra/stale entries for a non-existent collection or remote app is present.

Reference Articles:

-Ishu

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Last update:
‎Nov 09 2023 11:09 AM
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