Software Deployment

Hey kkaminsk,

If you could specify what the problem is or any info about the COM issue that would help in giving you some clues ;)

Typical 429 cannot create active x object. It is an internal application and normally these are easy to nail but I can't find a bad DLL call in dependency walker, filemon has no calls to non-existent dlls and the regmon output I am looking at some bad attempts to find CLSIDs in HKCU but all the info is in HKCR. I suspected a TLB file but if I register it using ccrpRegUtil it does not seem to fix things. It is one of those apps that works great on the desktop but not in Citrix.

So, if you've tried it all take a look at Strace.
I've used it alot for indepth debugging of system calls.
Strace works on NT4 SP4, SP5, and SP6; Windows 2000 GA, SP1, SP2, and SP3, and has preliminary support for Windows XP.
Often used it on Windows XP, sometimes it can't hook the process though. Never tried it on Windows 20003 server so can't tell if it will work.

But give it a try.
Have in mind that you will get alot of info, so it can be hard to find the info related to the issue.

Hope it works

Looks like the kind of logging I need but I can't get it to work on a terminal server. It can't seem to load the device driver.

[:(]

Only if I could afford AppSight Black Box....

What if you capture the installation on a very clean machine, lets say windows xp sp2 without any hotfix nor applications. Then see if you get those dependencies that you may were missing.

I did do an install on a clean build with no core application set and outside of group policy with no success. I thought it might be easier to spot the issue on a system in that has a minimal configuration as well. The fun part is that the installer works great on Win2K but Win2k3 is a different story. It hooks into Business Objects and Business Objects still has not been certified on our new Citrix platform so I don't even know if that install is fully functional. The installer is not even MSI (VB installer) so there can't be much in terms of complex logic and yet it can't successfully install. Unfortunately this application that has a history of being touchy and I've gone through the known issues that have occurred in the past. The best part is those known issues don't seem to be related to the issue I am seeing now. What is further complicating the issue is that I only get a few hours here and there to visit the application so it becomes difficult to focus on and keep track of my troubleshooting attempts. We might have to move this application off to another silo until we have more man hours available to spend on it. Oh the fun!!!

Did you verify that user classes registry didn't exist in the package? HKCU\Software\Classes will not roam by default. Just a thought [8D]

There is some stuff in HKCU classes that I am suspicious about but as far as I can tell from the diagnostics and manually registering components there is no issue there. I really wonder if there is a problematic EXE server in the mix. The last time I had this much fun fixing a COM issue it was an EXE server that was not correctly registered. To this day I don't know of a good way to identify issues with EXE servers.

Well in this case it may not be case about the HKCU Classes but I would anyway move those to HKCR so these will write to HKLM or HKCU depending on the ALLUSERS property.