Troubleshooting

How to Create User Mode Crash Dump Files If you experience application crashes you may be asked by support to create a crash dump file.

I have been watching streaming video for a very long time. It always worked beautifully, in high resolutions and from any site: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, you name it. Then suddenly I started to notice lip sync issues, probably around autumn/winter 2016. The longer a video played, the more the audio would get out of sync with the video, making watching and listening increasingly awkward. Recently I finally found the time to analyze these audio/video sync problems. Read on for a playback troubleshooting methodology followed by a workaround for the issue at hand.

When I tried to connect to the administrative file share C$ on my wife’s computer I got the error A device attached to the system is not functioning. The other way round worked without a hitch, i.e. I could access my laptop’s C$ share from my wife’s computer.

I am sure you all love XenDesktop VDAs that just won’t register. Although this is becoming less and less of a problem I had another case recently. Checking the Obvious When a XenDesktop VDA is unregistered the first thing I do is check if the VM is actually turned on. With that out of the way I turn to the application event log, looking for entries with the source Citrix Desktop Service. This usually tells you what the problem is. Not this time, however. Apparently the Citrix Desktop Service (aka WorkstationAgent) ran into some error during startup. It logged the following event with ID 1006 and stopped:

PowerCfg is a nifty little tool for analyzing and configuring all kinds of things related to battery usage and power plans. In Windows 8.1 PowerCfg learned how to analyze the effectiveness of connected standby, a new low-power mode introduced in Windows 8 that enables applications to stay connected while the device (mostly) sleeps. All the more frustrating when that new command suddenly stops working.

The most obscure effects often have the simplest explanations - once you know where to go looking for them. Luckily uberAgent tells you exactly what is going on. People often ask about the resource footprint of uberAgent. I usually tell them “no IO at all, around 15 MB RAM and below 0.5% CPU” and everybody is happy. Not this time, however.

I had to troubleshoot a case where it suddenly was not possible any more to connect via ICA/HDX to freshly installed Windows 7 VDI machines. As it turned out, the root cause was a combination of Microsoft disabling legacy technologies and Citrix relying on them.

Client Hyper-V was one of the things I was most looking forward to when I upgraded to Windows 8. I immediately added the Hyper-V feature and went to installing Server 2008 R2 in the first virtual machine. That went well enough and nothing extraordinary happened until I tried to run Windows Update in the new VM. Try as I might, Windows Update would always fail with the error code 80072EFE. Sometimes it chose to fail with 80072EE2, though.

I encountered a strange error when I moved my laptop’s hard drive to another computer to make room for an SSD. When I tried to install Windows 8 on the repurposed drive I could not see any partitions. Neither could I install Windows on the drive. I kept getting the error Windows cannot be installed to this disk. In addition, the setup process was extremely slow.

I had a very interesting case recently where copied EXE files could not be deleted. They would simply remain in the folder like zombies, only to disappear a few minutes later.

I was given the Aventail VPN client software to install on a customer’s Windows 7 x64 computer. That failed miserably. Here is what I did to find the root cause of the problem.