Failed to apply Citrix Group Policy, XenDesktop 7.X

It’s been a while since my last post, mainly because I’ve been deep in the trenches finalizing the migration of my company’s Brazil datacenter all the way up here in the Northeast. I can probably write an entire 20-part blog post on the growing pains of doing just that, but part of me would rather forget some of it :P.

SO on to the issue at hand; After migrating all the desktops up here, including the master image, I noticed that on all the new machines I was provisioning using MCS (machine creation services), were failing group policy updates with the following error message:

Windows failed to apply the Citrix Group Policy settings. Citrix Group Policy settings might have it’s own log file. Please click on the “More information” link.

Also in the ‘Application’ event logs, it was showing the following error message:

Faulting application name: CitrixCSeEngine.exe, version 2.1.0.0, time stamp: 0x5245e67c
Faulting module name: MSVCR90.dll, version: 9.0.30729.4940, time stamp: 0x4ca2ef57

In order to troubleshoot fixing this error without having to rebuild the entire master image, I tried the following tactics unsuccessfully:

• Installing a specific hotfix supplied by Citrix support that updated the CitrixCseEngine.exe  – Still broken.
• Uninstalling and re-installing the VDA – Still broken.
• Uninstalling and re-installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 – Still broken.
• Upgrading the entire VDA agent to from 7.1.X to 7.6 – Still broken.

It wasn’t until I started researching and poking around determining where all the group policies are stored on the machine when it does do the application of the group policy. I found a directory: C:\ProgramData\Citrix\GroupPolicy:

I deleted the contents of this entire directory (you’ll need administrative rights to do this), ran a gpupdate /force and voila; I was no longer seeing the group policy error message. As for the root cause and reason for the issue, I’m not entirely sure. I can speculate that it had something to do with a file overwriting another group policy file, etc.

I want to get this post up for everyone so that in case any one else is seeing the error, there is a possibility that you’ll come across this article and it’ll help you. I couldn’t find anything on google and even resorted to Citrix support who had nothing in their knowledge base for this resolution. In fact my Citrix Engineer, wonderful Juan G., is opening a KB just for my finding here. I’ll update this blog post with a link when it’s available!

Happy holidays everyone!