After playing around with several beta’s of vmware workstation 7, I decided to upgrade from 6.5 to 7.0 the minute it became available. Luckily enough vmware provided all beta testers with a discount code for 25% so that helped a little bit …

On my company issued notebook I was already running Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise and after installing vmware workstation I’ve pinned the program to the taskbar (available shortcut on the desktop), and that’s where the irritation begins

Whenever I started up vmware workstation another icon appeared on my taskbar..

What the heck….?

Well it seems this is a known bug in vmware workstation 7 and they’re working on it to resolve it in the future..

At least there’s a way to work around this issue:

Open vmware workstation, right-click on the icon on your taskbar and choose Pin this program to taskbar. Now you’ll have only icon on your taskbar and all recent opened vm guests  (or opened iso’s) will appear in your list.

A collaegue of mine rang me last week in order to solve a problem with user profiles not being cleaned up on virtualized Citrix servers (based on VMware Infrastructure 3.x). My first reaction was that it had nothing to do with VMware, but after some discussion through the phone I proved myself wrong.’This problem was caused by the VMware tools…

What was the case?

The citrix environment was installed on VMware Infrastructure 3.x and inside the guests were the VMwae tools installed (best practice). Probably these tools were installed with the complete option instead of the typical option and thus the shared folders feature was also installed. But this feature isn’t supported on VMware ESX hosts and needs to be disabled in order to prevent problems with the unloading of user profiles, because vmware tools has exclusive access to the file hgfs.dat which resides in the application data folder of the user.

How to solve this?

1. Uninstall VMware tools and reinstall these tools with the typical option (this will NOT install the shared folders feature)
2. Disable the shared folders feature through the registry:
   • Start regedit.exe
   • Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order
   • Right click ProviderOrder and choose Modify
   • Remove the word hgfs from the string and save the registry value
   • Exit the registry editor
   • Reboot the virtual machine
   • Clean up any remaining profiles before users can log on to this server

What is UPHClean?

UPHClean (User Profile Hive Cleanup Service) helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. Download here.

VMware Knowledgebase article about this problem: KB1317

Last week a colleague of mine struggled with pinning the icon of virtual pc to his taskbar in Windows 7 (RC). The problem is caused by the fact that virtual pc doesn’t have a console anymore as in previous versions. If you click the icon in the start menu it opens the folder containing your virtual machines and therefore if you want to pin the icon to your taskbar it gets pinned under explorer . Luckily enough he solved it in the evening. How?

Just open your start menu and type vmwindow in the search box. Right click vmwindow and choose pin to start menu

Afterwards you have a (separate) pinned icon to Virtual PC on your task bar.

April 28th the Microsoft Windows Vista team announced the Release to Manufacturing of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista & Windows Server 2008 on their blog. If you want to know what has been changed, check out the notable changes document on TechNet.

If you install the Service Pack there’s a new tool inside which cleans up previous versions of files (RTM & SP1) replaced by Service Pack 2.

How to do this?

Quite simple, open up a command prompt (in a elevated mode!), type compcln.exe, acknowledge the warning stating you can’t remove any cleaned packages and off you go.

In older versions of Microsoft Office you could update the installation files of Microsoft Office by patching these files. As of version 2007 this has changed a bit, but it’s still quite simple to do.

How?

1. Copy the contents of you installation disc to a folder (C:\o2k7) on your computer.
2. Download service pack 2 for Office 2007 here
3. Extract the contents of the service pack to a folder (C:\sp2) on your computer by using the command .\office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:C:\sp2.  
4. You must accept the license agreement before continuing.
5. When the extraction has finished copy the contents of C:\Sp2 to C:\o2k7\Updates   
6. Create a new installation medium containing all files/folders in c:\o2k7
7. You’re finished.

In fact this is not a real slipstream, but the installer of Office 2007 automatically installs any update that’s placed in the updates folder.