Adobe Reader hangs on Citrix

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Symptoms:
The user cannot open new PDF’s. When we look on the TS process list, we can see multiple acrord32.exe’s, one for each attempt to open a PDF after the hang occurs. The user/Citrix Control Panel can not see the process. After a while an error saying referring to the DDE service may pop up, but this is bogus error message as far as we can tell. (We have tried enabling the service too.)

We have been able to figure out that this happens consistently when the user uses the “x” on the right click “drop down” menu from the Windows taskbar in Vista/7 to close Reader, but it seems it can also occur when closed in other ways, although rarely.

It seems that only a few 5-10 of our 1000+ users get this error at all, and about 2-3 of them get it a lot more than the rest. This is at least partially because of patterns of use.

We run Windows 2003 R2 fully patched as of now.
We run Presentation Server 4.5.
We have tried Adobe Reader 6, 7, 8, 9, X. Same error on all.

Information on this is scarce, but we have been able to find a few posts on it. Most not offering any solution. The only solution suggested is to install the v 12 Xen (Citrix) client, but that doesn’t help.

Some of the better posts describing the same error:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/thin/message/144256

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=260397&tstart=0

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer

The registry hack I gave you recreates/resets standard Windows execution for ‘.exe’ files.
Right after I applied this fix Windows was able to associate PDF files with
my default PDF reader software ( in my case with Foxit Reader) and more importantly to remember settings. This was an easy fix for me when I was loged in as administrator.
Next step was to disconnect/log off all Wyse terminal clients and start new session(s) after which end users were able to do the same thing: double-click on PDF file, and after Windows promt which application to use to handle PDF files and appropriate steps ( application selection) they all had functionality back.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Gomibushi , Answer Author : Ned Visnjic

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