Earlier today, I was working on building a new XenApp 6 server. All I had really gotten to was installing XenApp 6, then I published WordPad to verify basic access, I hadn’t gotten to into things yet. I logged into the Web Interface page, worked beautifully, it displayed my application and even when I launched it, everything appeared to be working fine but the program never launched and I realized I lost my RDP session to the XenApp server when I launched the app. I could still ping the IP, but I could not communicate with the server otherwise. I looked at the server console in vCenter, and saw that it was shutting down! I do not recall ever seeing a Citrix server shutdown from trying to launch WordPad and I thought “great”, what kind of crazy problem am I dealing with here, why isn’t this just working.

So as I went outside to call my wife and pace around a little, the engineer I was working with decided to do a little investigating and by the time I got back inside, he had traced down the issue to the following:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126711

The article itself is entitled Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 – Known Issues and honestly, I hadn’t even realized the server we were building had 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. Two of the issues listed are:

1. You cannot connect to Citrix sessions when Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 is present.

2. Svchost.exe crashes in TermService

I can assure you that these two are real issues. The tech article references that to fix the issue you should apply Citrix Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64001, but according to CTX128043, Citrix Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64001 has been replaced with XA600W2K8R2X64040.

However, the release notes for Citrix Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64040 state that, “Installing this hotfix can inadvertently remove the Citrix Licensing component, if present, from the system. To prevent this issue, make sure to install Hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64002, available as Knowledge Center article CTX126123.” Be sure to install the XA600W2K8R2X64002 hotfix prior to installing XA600W2K8R2X64040!

Once these updates were applied and the server rebooted, published applications worked as they should.