Symptoms
When third party software is installed on the XenApp server, anytime a user tries to launch any of the published applications hosted on that server, the following error appears:
“The Citrix server is unable to process your request to start this published application at this time.
Please try again later. If the problem persists, contact your administrator.”
Cause
A possible cause for this issue is that the third party software installation utilizes an executable file named cmstart.exe and modified the environment variables to point to that executable. Because XenApp uses an executable named cmstart.exe for the launch of publish applications it might get confused and locate the cmstart.exe of the third party software instead. Of course by using the wrong version of cmstart.exe the launch process breaks.
One common reason why XenApp located the wrong cmstart.exe is because the third party software might have modified the environment path variables to point to its cmstart.exe. XenApp does the same to locate cmstart.exe for publish application launch process. So the variables provided by the third party software get the priority.
Example
Environment path variable before the third party software installation on a XenApp 6.0 server.
The location of cmstart.exe of XenApp 6.0 is “C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32cmstart.exe”.
“%SystemRoot%system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%System32Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%System32WindowsPowerShellv1.0;C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32;C:Program Files (x86)CitrixSystem32CitrixIMA;C:Program Files (x86)CitrixSystem32CitrixIMASubsystems;%SystemRoot%System32CitrixIMA;C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32;C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesCitrixSystem32;C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server100ToolsBinn;C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server100DTSBinn;”
Environment path variable after the third party software installation on a XenApp 6.0 server.
The location of cmstart.exe of the third party software is “C:Program Files (x86)ThirdPartyBincmstart.exe”.
C:Program Files (x86)ThirdPartyBin;“%SystemRoot%system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%System32Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%System32WindowsPowerShellv1.0;C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32;C:Program Files (x86)CitrixSystem32CitrixIMA;C:Program Files (x86)CitrixSystem32CitrixIMASubsystems;%SystemRoot%System32CitrixIMA;C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32;C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesCitrixSystem32;C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server100ToolsBinn;C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server100DTSBinn;”
Resolution
An easy to change resolution is to move the variable of the location of the third party software after the XenApp variables. After the change XenApp should locate the correct version of cmstart.exe
“%SystemRoot%system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%System32Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%System32WindowsPowerShellv1.0;C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32;C:Program Files (x86)CitrixSystem32CitrixIMA;C:Program Files (x86)CitrixSystem32CitrixIMASubsystems;%SystemRoot%System32CitrixIMA;C:Program Files (x86)Citrixsystem32;C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesCitrixSystem32;C:Program Files (x86)ThirdPartyBin;C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server100ToolsBinn;C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SQL Server100DTSBinn;”
More Information
There is a case study discussing this same issue that occurs with specific third party software in the Knowledge Center article CTX129358 – Case Study: Application Launch Fails because of CMSTART.EXE for more information.
The same case study provides troubleshooting steps that were done to discover this type of problem.
ICA Connection Starts and Immediately Disappears
Explaining and Troubleshooting ICA Session Initialization and Published Application Launching
This document applies to:
- XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2003 x64
- XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2003 x86
- XenApp 6.0 for Windows Server 2008 R2
- XenApp 6.5 for Windows Server 2008 R2
