siteadmin - Virtual Engine Ltd

22nd February 2012

HP Thinpros and Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS)

I’ve been sitting on this blog for a while; so I thought it was about time I published it! Just recently we’ve been working with a client that was going through a desktop transformation process from Windows XP to HP thin client’s using a shared desktop on Windows 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS). I’m not going to expand on why they chose Microsoft RDS over Citrix XenApp 6.x or why they chose Linux-based thin clients over Windows Embedded clients. Let’s just say that money did come into the equation.

What I’m going to cover in this post are the issues I’ve encountered whilst using the HP t5565 Linux-based thin clients with Microsoft’s RDS.

Remote Desktop Services Connection Broker

Lets start with the BIG one; they do not support the Remote Desktop Connection Broker (RDCB) or should I really say the open source rdesktop doesn’t! Now when I mean they it’s not supported, it can imply that it will work fine (but please don’t ask the vendor to help if any issues arise). In this case it simply doesn’t work. When the RDCB tries to either load balance or reconnect a disconnected session you will face a situation where you enter your login credentials then the session seems to just drop. If you are lucky your load balancer or round-robin DNS will direct you to the correct server, but this is just the laws of probability in action.

I should point out that this point will probably be an issue for any thin clients that are Linux-based and and utilising the rdesktop client. I have heard rumours that FreeRDP does work with the RDCB but I’ve not tried that myself so can’t confirm this; though this forum post does suggest it will work.

Bitmap Caching

Using “Bitmap Caching” in the rdesktop settings causes the screen to freeze randomly; so you have to way up the pros and cons of leaving it turned on. The benefits of enabling the bitmap cache is to minimise the amount of data transferred between the RDP client and server. However, this introduces the screen freezes. As a result, I went with disabling the bitmap caching to improve the user experience – the client had a well connected network so latency etc. was not an issue.

Other Issues

Drawing shapes in Office 2003 will cause the screen to freeze and the system will become unresponsive – Resolved with this forum post.
Using a second monitor to extend the primary display doesn’t work i.e. only show the taskbar on the primary display. What happens is screen spanning occurs therefore the taskbar is split across both monitors and the “Ctrl+Alt+Del” dialogue appears slap bang in the middle of where the monitors join – Resolved with this forum post (though I haven’t had time to test this myself).

I think the moral of this story is to try before you buy and then try some more! If you want to use the RDS Connection Broker then go for a Windows Embedded thin client, if indeed you want to use a thin client. Taking this approach may save you a lot of headaches going forward.

Nathan

20th February 2012

RES Workspace Manager Migration Settings

Following on from the Application Upgrades in RES Workspace Manager post, I thought I would put pen to paper to put to bed the confusion surrounding the whole “Migration settings” for RES Workspace Manager 2011 User Preferences/Settings. In fact, RES Workspace Manager allows for two separate types of User Settings migration; the migration of user settings stored in a previous location and migration of User Settings when switching between Zero-Profiling modes (from RES Workspace Manager 2011 SR2 onwards). There is often the miscomprehension that the migration options will automagically migrate user settings between defined applications, i.e. Word 2003 to Word 2007. This is categorically not the case (and will be a future post!). So what are the differences between the two options?

User Settings Storage Migration

This option available under the Composition > User Settings within the RES Workspace Manager console allows you to migrate stored User Settings from a previous location and looks just a little bit like this:

When would we enable this option? You will use this option when you want to move or copy settings stored in a prior location to an alternative location. Historically, RES PowerFuse always required that you stored the user’s User Settings in their home drive location. Although hidden, this could quite often cause confusion and had serious consequences if hard quotas were in place.

Starting with RES Workspace Manager 2011, this is no longer the case. User Settings still have to reside within an assigned drive letter location, but this no longer has to be the same location as the user’s home directory. This very option enables you to migrate existing user settings from a previous location to another drive. Nothing more, nothing less (and no migration of settings defined behind a Word 2003 application to Word 2007!). Here’s an example:

User home directories are mapped to H: and you previously stored the User Settings in the \PWRMENU subfolder (may or may not be mapped via Active Directory).
You wish to store User Settings in the X:\UserSettings folder that will be hidden by RES Workspace Manager (how and where you map X: are up to you!).
Configuring the migration settings as above will move all the User Settings from H:\PWRMENU to X:\UserSettings, but only if they exist.
All new captured User Settings will be put into X:\UserSettings.

Zero-Profile Migration

The second User Settings migration option allows you to migrate existing User Settings captured with one Zero-Profile mode to the other, i.e. migrate UPR/UPF files to/from UPR2/UPF2 files. You may or may not know this, but the way in which RES Workspace Manager stores User Settings depends on the configured Zero-Profile mode. If an application is configured to “Capture” then the settings are stored in the traditional format, e.g. .UPR and .UPF files. If you happen to configure an application in “Tracking” mode then you’ll end up with .UPR2 and .UPF2 files. I am informed that this is due to the fact that tracked settings are appended to the resulting file (and compressed) as they’re changed etc.

By default, if you switch from one Zero-Profile mode to another, RES Workspace Manager will suddenly be looking for User Settings files that don’t exist. Worse still, if you happened to have had the other mode configured for a while, changed it and then reverted, you may place some old Users Settings back into the user’s profile!

The migration setting on the User Settings tab behind an application is designed to help avoid this situation and migrate the captured User Settings to/from UPR/UPR2 (and UPF/UPF2) files.

The settings above have the following definitions:

Ignore – RES Workspace Manager will ignore the other file type (if present) and start capturing in the configured mode.
Remove – RES Workspace Manager will delete the User Settings stored (if present) in the alternative format.
Apply and Remove – RES Workspace Manager will migrate the stored User Settings (if present) and then delete the alternative format.

All this is fairly straight forward once you know the in’s and out’s (and still no migration of settings defined behind a Word 2003 application to Word 2007 regardless of the configured Zero-Profile mode!). You can manually move User Settings from one application to another and this might be a future post or even make it into the Virtual Engine Toolkit.

As always, I hope this helps clarify things for somebody, some day! Iain

16th February 2012

Scheduled RES Software Courses Q1 2012

Virtual Engine are proud to announce the availablility of official RES Workspace Manager 2011 and RES Automation Manager 2011 scheduled courses for Q1 2012, in London.

Both courses will be held in March on the following dates:

RES Workspace Manager: 05/03/2012 – 08/03/2012;
RES Automation Manager: 12/03/2012 – 14/03/2012.

For further information on pricing and availability please contact us.

15th February 2012

What’s New in VET v1.1

With the public release of the Virtual Engine Toolkit (VET) v1.1 just around the corner, we’ve put together a short overview video demonstrating each new feature. In the “What’s New” video we cover the following features:

Conversion of Group Policy Objects to RES Workspace Manager building blocks;
Conversion of Active Directory published printers and site definitions to RES Workspace Manager building blocks;
Direct import into the RES Workspace Manager console;
Multiple profile updates with the Profile Update Utility (PuU);
Ad-hoc registry changes in the Profile Update Utility (PuU).

For more videos on the Virtual Engine Toolkit, please check out our YouTube channel here.

13th February 2012

Application Upgrades in RES Workspace Manager

Upgrading applications that store user personalisation settings in different places for different versions of the application can be problematic and we at Virtual Engine run into this time and time again. The most obvious example is Microsoft Office migrations but this isn’t the only example. Due to the latest upgrade cycles, the typical problem we come across is migrating from Office 2003/2007 running on Windows XP to Office 2010 running on top of Windows 7. Why is this so problematic?

Best practise within RES Workspace Manager mandates that application settings should be captured at the application level to improve logon performance etc. For example, we normally configure Microsoft Word to capture user personalisation settings behind the application like so:

In addition we probably have our applications to to be hidden (I’ll come back to this later) when they’re not detected on a machine, i.e. we won’t show the Word 2003 icon if Word 2010 is installed (and vice versa). The different application versions are installed into different paths and we don’t want both application icons appearing and confusing our users. Therefore, all the various Office applications are configured with the ‘Hide application if executable was not found‘ option.

This is fine for the individual application settings, but what about Office-wide settings, i.e. the stuff stored in ‘HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common‘ or ‘HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common‘? Normally we capture these all encompassing settings as a global User Setting, a la:

It’s all fairly straight forward thus far and so why the blog post? Well, this is where the fun starts. We have all our Office 2003 applications configured and we introduce the Office 2010 applications into Workspace Manager and configure the user personalisation capture settings as defined above, probably like this:

Are you with me so far? Good!

The first time that an Office 2010 application is run it will attempt to migrate/upgrade the existing user settings (if they exist) and write them into the Office 2010 specific locations, i.e. ‘HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0‘. Now, think about this for a second as we have a BIG problem… We have moved the user from a v1 profile (on Windows XP) to a v2 profile (on Windows 7) which means a clean slate and no existing user settings. “WAIT,” I hear you cry, “RES WM will layer the user settings back in!”

Unfortunately, you’re wrong! RES Workspace Manager will only layer the application settings back in for an individual application if it’s detected on the system. Remember, we’ve elected to ‘Hide the application if executable was not found’ and therefore, they’re not loaded. When we start an Office 2010 application there is seemingly nothing to migrate. DOH! We’re safe with the global Office-wide settings though, as they are configured at the global level (loaded at logon) and not dependent on any application detection.

So how do we at Virtual Engine get around this little conundrum? Simple; linked user settings!

I don’t know why but this solution seems to confuse a lot of people. It’s actually an elegant solution and should be (in my humble opinion) adopted as a standard/best practice :=). Essentially we configure dummy applications that have the various user personalisation settings configured for each version of the application that we’re interested in. For example, we create a ‘Microsoft Word’ application that is hidden but will capture the user settings for all the individual Office Word versions, e.g. in our example Microsoft Word 2003 and Microsoft Word 2010 like so:

Each of the individual applications are configured as before, but their user personalisation settings are linked to our dummy Word application. Fortunately, this means that both the Word 2003 and Word 2010 settings will be layered onto the Windows 7 machine if either Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2010 is detected. When a user launches Word 2010, the previous settings will be available, upgraded and then captured in the same way. Here is how we now configure Microsoft Word 2003 as an example:

There is a small down-side to this approach. We’ll be collecting two sets of roughly the same settings for a short period. However, it’s a small price to pay compared to losing everyone’s settings and once the migration is complete, the user settings definition previous Word version, 2003 in our instance, can be removed from the dummy application. If you ever need to upgrade to the next version of Office you’ll also be covered with this solution. Hopefully, it’s fairly obviously that this approach can be used for application other than the Microsoft Office suite too.

We would like to hear how other people tackle this problem as well as update this post if someone has a more elegant solution/idea. Please leave your comments below and thanks for persevering.

Thanks, Iain

1st February 2012

Internet Explorer Personalisation with RES Workspace Manager

Looking at user settings, below are some recommendations for managing Internet Explorer with RES Workspace Manager. These are not RES “best practices” but tips and tricks picked up in the field after a number of deployments.

Configure IE User Settings at a global level (or as an ‘auto launched’ application) so that they get applied to the user’s session at log on. There are lots of applications that rely on these settings and if they’re loaded in the background, they may not be available when needed and cause confusion.
Do not use “Zero Profile” mode User Tracking for Internet Explorer. I’ve seen lots of deployments with this enabled and it generates very large User Settings (UPR2 and UPF2) files as IE touches lots of files and registry keys when running. This will certainly result in slower log on/off times and is not required – use the built-in User Settings template.
Keep user Favo(u)rites, Cookies and History User Settings separate from the IE application User Settings, i.e. define two User Settings. This is contrary to the default User Settings template supplied by RES, however, but this allows users to reset the general settings for IE without affecting the their personal Cookies, Favo(u)rites and History.
We have found that when using the default User Settings template supplied by RES it doesn’t capture any typed URL history in Internet Explorer. To resolve this issue just add the registry key : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs to the IE application User Settings.
If you have multiple managed instances of Internet Explorer, i.e. shortcuts to URLs that point to IEXPLORE.EXE make sure you link the settings back to the “master” IE application. Creating “snapshots” of the same keys and files/folders can cause major inconsistencies to the user’s environment as RES Workspace Manager loads different settings depending on which shortcut is used.

Enjoy ! Additional comments and recommendations are more then welcome!

Thanks,

Simon

17th January 2012

Updating Mandatory Profiles Part 2

Having seen that our original Updating Mandatory Profiles post is quite popular, I thought I’d follow it up with an update. The process described in the first post is quite labourious and error prone. I’d like to make people aware of how quick and easy the Profile Update Utility (PuU) makes updating a mandatory profile with ActiveSetup keys.

Here’s the new process:

Obviously you’ll need to have downloaded (it’s free) and installed VET.
Once installed, simply launch the Profile Update Utility.
Select your mandatory profile by clicking the “Browse” button (step 1).
Check the “Merge HKEY_CURRENT_USER ActiveSetup keys” checkbox (step 2).
Click the “Go” button (step 3).

It doesn’t get much simpler than that! Note: This will merge the ActiveSetup keys from the currently logged on user. Therefore, you need to perform this action on a machine that you’ll be using the mandatory profile on.

The “Output Options” at the bottom of the PuU windows could probably do with some explaination as there is sometimes some confustion.

Update Original Profile: Overwrites the source (Step 1) profile.
Backup Profile: Copies the source profile (in Step 1) to a .bak file and then updates the original.
Create New Profile: Copies the source profile (in Step 1), renames the original (in Step 1) to a .bak file and then updates the new copy.

Which option you use is up to you depending on how you manage the lifecycle of your mandatory profiles.

Enjoy – Iain

16th January 2012

Locating Computer GPO Registry Values

I come across this scenario all the time that requires a HKLM registry setting to be configured. Typically this can be implemented via Group Policy but, for whatever reason, you which to set the resulting registry value directly. It might be because you don’t wish to cut a new GPO just for a couple of servers or workstations. A common requirement is to set the RDS licensing server as part of an automated deployment. Maybe you use RES Automation Manager like we do. However, this scenario is not limited to just RES Automation Manager. You could use the information in this post to configure a few specific settings as part of a WDS deployment for example.

Hopefully by now you are all familiar with the free Virtual Engine Toolkit (VET). No!? Shame on you! I suggest you take a look over here and see how it can help migrate from a unmanaged user environment to a managed one.

So you now know VET is especially good at converting user related GPOs into .REG files that can be imported in your UV/UEM tool of choice i.e. RES Workspace Manager or AppSense Environment Manager. One of VET’s hidden talents (and undocumented until now) is we can also convert computer related GPO’s into .REG files.

Using the settings above as an example I’ll run you through how we achieve this with RES Automation Manager and not in a GPO. If you’ve read our series on user GPO migration then you’re aware that GPO settings (not all!) are just registry settings. The problem we normally have, is where and what should these values be set to?

You could at this point download the Microsoft Group Policy Settings Reference guide and find the individual registry keys. You could use the Group Policy Search which Kees Baggerman spotted and pointed out in this blog post Winking smile . You can spend time Googling them at which point you would have to start manually adding them to the registry task in AM. But its much, much simpler to use VET!

NOTE: the same process could be used for migrating multiple existing computer related GPOs into AM but please be aware that the computer will probably need a reboot before the targeted settings come into force.

First thing to we need to do is create a Dummy GPO where we can set the various policies we’d like included in AM. In my example I’ve called my GPO “Dummy GPO for VET” and configured the settings we’d like to apply as in our example above.
Next we need to launch VET and use the “Convert Group Policy Objects Wizard” to scan the SYSVOL folder for our newly created/existing GPO. Once VET displays the list of GPOs select the one that you wish to convert then click “Next”
.
Select “Use subfolders for User and Machine policies”. Deselect “Also create RES Workspace Manager Building Block Files” then click “Next”, “Next” and “Finish”.
Looking in the “Documents\Machine” folder you’ll find the newly created .REG File containing our settings.
Now launch the RES AM console and create a new module which contains the “Registry Settings (Apply)” task. Its then a case of importing the .REG File created previously; so you should end up with something looking like this.

It’s as simple as that! We’ve used a dummy GPO that is not applied to any computer objects, set our required settings and imported the exact resultant registry values into RES Automation Manager. You can probably think of other great use cases for this too.

You never know we might incorporate the ability for VET to generate RES Automation Manager building blocks in the future.. Hope this little gem helps someone in the future like it has me!

Nathan

11th January 2012

The case of the missing Office 2007 Quick Access Toolbars

Recently I’ve been involved with one of our customers who is migrating from RES PowerFuse 2008 and roaming profiles on XenApp to RES Workspace Manager 2011 (WM) utilising Zero Profile Technology (ZPT) and a mandatory profile.

One of the issues they had on the new environment was the Office 2007 Quick Access Toolbars (QAT) weren’t being captured by WM using the built-in templates provided which capture the locations set out below:

Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (v1 profiles):
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office

Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (v2 profiles):
%USERPROFILE%\Appdata\Local\Microsoft\Office

So everything appeared to be configured correctly; but still the QAT files weren’t being captured or worse still weren’t being saved in those locations.

Upon further investigation the QAT files where actually being saved in ‘%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office’ which seemed very odd to me as I was sure one of the problems that people found when using roaming profiles with Office 2007 was the QAT didn’t roam!. This led me into thinking that maybe Microsoft had at some point released a hotfix that did in fact allow the QAT files to roam. So lets turn to the interweb and see what that brings up, and low and behold, Microsoft did just that and released a hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958062 (included in Office 2007 SP2). Setting the registry key as described in the Microsoft article forces the QAT files to be saved in the users profile which would then allow them to roam.

Once I had this vital information I quickly found that this particular customer had uncovered this fix and had implemented it using RES PowerFuse 2008 (clever boys/gals!!). Because we had copied and upgraded the RES PowerFuse 2008 datastore to WM 2011, this user registry setting was being applied to the new environment. To resolve the problem we simply removed that registry setting and let the power of the templates supplied with RES WM 2011 do their thing and capture the QAT files in the default location.

NOTE: One thing I will add about the supplied templates is they don’t capture the QAT files for Outlook 2007 i.e. Olkaddritem.qat, Olkapptitem.qat, Olkdistitem.qat, Olklogitem.qat, Olkmailitem.qat, Olkpostitem.qat and Olktaskitem.qat.

To resolve this issue you can add file filter ‘%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\Olk*.qat’ to the capture settings for Outlook 2007. Hopefully this will get rolled into the default Office 2007 application templates by RES in a future release.

Hope this helps.

Nathan

30th December 2011

Active Setup – Stubpath Command Lines

I spend a lot time working with mandatory profiles and RES Workspace Manager, especially when using Citrix XenApp or Remote Desktop Services. One of the key elements to creating a slick mandatory profile is to ensure the Active Setup keys are added to the mandatory profile or you will forever see the annoying “Personaliz(s)ing Settings” message. We have covered how to do this in a previous post here by using our great free tool the Virtual Engine Profile Update Utility (PuU).

While you can merge these Active Setup Keys to stop the message box appearing; this isn’t actually where the story ends. Behind some Active Setup Components there is a command line (Stubpath) that needs to run once per user i.e. for new users logging on for the first time (for a great explanation of Active Setup, check out Helge Klein’s write up here). The drawback of just merging these keys will be that the command line (Stubpath) will not run for any user. This could have undesirable results as mentioned in the RES Blog post here and Andrew Morgan’s Blog post here.

So the purpose of this blog is really for informational purposes above anything else and to detail the most common Active Setup components containing Stubpaths, by OS. Should you need this information, it’s here for reference. For example, if you disable the ActiveSetup option within RES Workspace Manager or merge the ActiveSetup keys using the Profile Update Utility (PuU), you may have to reinstate a particular action if it causes issues (like Andy’s issue). The command line (Stubpath) is highlighted in yellow and can be used to remedy the situation if necessary:

UPDATE : Windows 8 Consumer Preview (Subject to Change) – Yes ActiveSetup is still here!

{2C7339CF-2B09-4501-B3F3-F3508C9228ED}
Themes Setup
%SystemRoot%\system32\regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:/UserInstall %SystemRoot%\system32\themeui.dll

{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}
Microsoft Windows (MailNews)
"%ProgramFiles%\Windows Mail\WinMail.exe" OCInstallUserConfigOE

{6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
%SystemRoot%\system32\unregmp2.exe /FirstLogon

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4340}
Windows Desktop Update
regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:U %SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4383}
Web Platform Customizations
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -BaseSettings

{89B4C1CD-B018-4511-B0A1-5476DBF70820}
DOTNETFRAMEWORKS
C:\Windows\System32\Rundll32.exe C:\Windows\System32\mscories.dll,Install

>{22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
%SystemRoot%\system32\unregmp2.exe /ShowWMP

>{26923b43-4d38-484f-9b9e-de460746276c}
Internet Explorer
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -UserIconConfig

>{60B49E34-C7CC-11D0-8953-00A0C90347FF}
Browser Customizations
"C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\iedkcs32.dll",BrandIEActiveSetup SIGNUP

>{ABB824FE-FBBE-464D-9AAA-FAFED848BF41}
IE History
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -UpgradeOldHistoryEntries

Windows XP

{2C7339CF-2B09-4501-B3F3-F3508C9228ED}
Themes Setup
%SystemRoot%\system32\regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:/UserInstall %SystemRoot%\system32\themeui.dll

{44BBA842-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015B}
NetMeeting 3.01
rundll32.exe advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection C:\WINDOWS\INF\msnetmtg.inf,NetMtg.Install.PerUser.NT

{5945c046-1e7d-11d1-bc44-00c04fd912be}
Windows Messenger 4.7
rundll32.exe advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection C:\WINDOWS\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.QuietInstall.PerUser

{6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
rundll32.exe advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection C:\WINDOWS\INF\wmp11.inf,PerUserStub

{7790769C-0471-11d2-AF11-00C04FA35D02}
Address Book 6
"%ProgramFiles%\Outlook Express\setup50.exe" /APP:WAB /CALLER:WINNT /user /install

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4340}
Windows Desktop Update
regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:U shell32.dll

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4383}
Internet Explorer
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -BaseSettings

{89B4C1CD-B018-4511-B0A1-5476DBF70820}
DOTNETFRAMEWORKS
C:\Windows\system32\Rundll32.exe C:\Windows\system32\mscories.dll,Install

<{12d0ed0d-0ee0-4f90-8827-78cefb8f4988}
Internet Explorer Version Update
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ieudinit.exe

>{22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
C:\WINDOWS\inf\unregmp2.exe /ShowWMP

>{26923b43-4d38-484f-9b9e-de460746276c}
Internet Explorer
C:\WINDOWS\system32\ie4uinit.exe -UserIconConfig

>{60B49E34-C7CC-11D0-8953-00A0C90347FF}
Browser Customizations
"C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\iedkcs32.dll",BrandIEActiveSetup SIGNUP

>{60B49E34-C7CC-11D0-8953-00A0C90347FF}MICROS
Browser Customizations
RunDLL32 IEDKCS32.DLL,BrandIE4 SIGNUP

>{881dd1c5-3dcf-431b-b061-f3f88e8be88a}
Outlook Express
%systemroot%\system32\shmgrate.exe OCInstallUserConfigOE

Windows 7 32bit

{2C7339CF-2B09-4501-B3F3-F3508C9228ED}
Themes Setup
%SystemRoot%\system32\regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:/UserInstall %SystemRoot%\system32\themeui.dll

{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}
Microsoft Windows (MailNews)
"%ProgramFiles%\Windows Mail\WinMail.exe" OCInstallUserConfigOE

{6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
%SystemRoot%\system32\unregmp2.exe /FirstLogon /Shortcuts /RegBrowsers /ResetMUI

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4340}
Windows Desktop Update
regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:U shell32.dll

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4383}
Web Platform Customizations
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -BaseSettings

{89B4C1CD-B018-4511-B0A1-5476DBF70820}
DOTNETFRAMEWORKS
C:\Windows\system32\Rundll32.exe C:\Windows\system32\mscories.dll,Install

>{22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
%SystemRoot%\system32\unregmp2.exe /ShowWMP

>{26923b43-4d38-484f-9b9e-de460746276c}
Internet Explorer
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -UserIconConfig

>{60B49E34-C7CC-11D0-8953-00A0C90347FF}
Browser Customizations
"C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\iedkcs32.dll",BrandIEActiveSetup SIGNUP

Windows 2008 R2 SP1 with Desktop Experience Installed

{2C7339CF-2B09-4501-B3F3-F3508C9228ED}
Themes Setup
%SystemRoot%\system32\regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:/UserInstall %SystemRoot%\system32\themeui.dll

{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}
Microsoft Windows (MailNews)
"%ProgramFiles%\Windows Mail\WinMail.exe" OCInstallUserConfigOE
"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Mail\WinMail.exe" OCInstallUserConfigOE

{6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
%SystemRoot%\system32\unregmp2.exe /FirstLogon /Shortcuts /RegBrowsers /ResetMUI

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4340}
Windows Desktop Update
regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:U shell32.dll

{89820200-ECBD-11cf-8B85-00AA005B4383}
Web Platform Customizations
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -BaseSettings
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ie4uinit.exe -BaseSettings

{89B4C1CD-B018-4511-B0A1-5476DBF70820}
DOTNETFRAMEWORKS
C:\Windows\system32\Rundll32.exe C:\Windows\system32\mscories.dll,Install
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Rundll32.exe C:\Windows\SysWOW64\mscories.dll,Install

{A509B1A7-37EF-4b3f-8CFC-4F3A74704073}
Applying Enhanced Security Configuration (Admin)
"C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\iesetup.dll",IEHardenAdmin
"C:\Windows\SysWOW64\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\iesetup.dll",IEHardenAdmin

{A509B1A8-37EF-4b3f-8CFC-4F3A74704073}
Applying Enhanced Security Configuration (User)
"C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\iesetup.dll",IEHardenUser
"C:\Windows\SysWOW64\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\iesetup.dll",IEHardenUser

>{22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95}
Microsoft Windows Media Player
%SystemRoot%\system32\unregmp2.exe /ShowWMP

>{26923b43-4d38-484f-9b9e-de460746276c}
Internet Explorer
C:\Windows\System32\ie4uinit.exe -UserIconConfig
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ie4uinit.exe -UserIconConfig

>{60B49E34-C7CC-11D0-8953-00A0C90347FF}
Browser Customizations
"C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\iedkcs32.dll",BrandIEActiveSetup SIGNUP
"C:\Windows\SysWOW64\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\iedkcs32.dll",BrandIEActiveSetup SIGNUP

Should anyone wish to expand on what each Active Setup Component does please feel free to leave a comment I’ll update the blog accordingly; some are more obvious than others Winking smile .

Enjoy

Nathan