Troubleshooting example with RES Workspace Manager

Today I am helping an IT department with troubleshooting on a Citrix XenApp environment that is managed trough RES Workspace Manager.

The call I receive is that a user complains that when he opens an attachment in Outlook it appears automatically in his ‘My Documents’ folder and then disappears when the attachment is closed.

This behavior is caused by a registry key called OutlookSecureTempFolder under HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Office\Version\Outlook\Security

In this environment there is a long list of registry files and policy’s that is loaded at user login. The next step is to find out which registry file or policy is responsible for adding a value to the above mentioned registry key.

 

First we have to select a user. Under Diagnostics choose ‘Workspace Analysis’. For this example I use my own account.

Double-click on the username, click on Composition tab.

 

Now you see the screen similar to the screenshot below. Open the node Other and double-click ‘User Registry’
Now you see a list of all the registry files and policy’s that are loaded within the workspace of the selected user account. At the bottom of the screen you see the following:

By clicking on the button ‘End Result’ you open an new screen with the end result of all the above registry en policy settings.

Now you can see which registry file is responsible for the above mentioned value in the registry. It is better to have this path point to an location that is not visible to the user and that is purged as the user logs off. In this case we choose to have this value point to ‘%temp%’ The user is going to save the file to his own location anyway.