Ivanti Workspace keeps crashing/restarting

I recently came across a really weird issue. A user called complaining his desktop screen kept going black after logging in to an new VDI session. Then the start menu would appear for a few seconds and then it went back to black. I shadowed his session and it looked like the Ivanti Workspace shell (pwrstart.exe) kept crashing and restarting. This was confirmed by Event Viewer events (eventID 1002). The strange thing about it was that it was an informational event, not an error event so no crashdumps to help me figure out why the crashes occurred.

Since this user was the only one with this problem and it occured on a non-persistent VDI desktop, I figured there must be something wrong with the Ivanti user settings so I deleted them. To my surprise this did not resolve the issue! This did however narrow it down to the user’s account and/or his homedrive. When inspecting the users homedrive we found a bunch of files in his desktop folder (which is redirected by Ivanti) that had unusually long names! And sure enough, one of them had a filename of over 260 characters long!

After some tinkering we got rid of the file and all was well again. Because of the long filename pwrstart.exe crashed as soon as it tried to redirect the desktop folder.

Michaja van der Zouwen

Is an all-round IT engineer with special skills in Microsoft, Citrix, RES and VMware products. Loves a challenge in his work and has taught himself scripting. Initially batch scripts, and later PowerShell. This helps him to automate processes and procedures, and to develop his own management tools which can be used every day.

Core qualities
Team player, enthusiastic, eager to learn, sociable, positive

Hobbies
Football, playing music, watching movies and series

Job description
Senior Technical Specialist