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Profile Management
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Troubleshoot common issues

March 15, 2023
Contributed by: 
L

This article describes how to troubleshoot common Profile Management issues.

Slow logons

If your users encounter slow logons, follow these steps to troubleshoot:

  1. Check the profile load time in the Logon Duration panel of Citrix Director. If it’s substantially longer than expected, the slow logon is caused by loading user profiles.

    See Diagnose user logon issues for details.

  2. Check the profile processing time in the Citrix Profile Management log file.

    In the Profile Management log file at C:\Windows\System32\Log Files\User Profile Manager, locate the entry starting with DispatchLogonLogoff. The following example shows that the logon processing time is 10.22 seconds.

    DispatchLogonLogoff: ---------- Finished logon processing successfully in [s]: <10.22>.

  3. Make sure that you’ve applied the recommended Profile Management policies.

    Follow the recommendations for improving logon performance in Improve user logon performance.

  4. Contact Citrix Technical Support.

    If slow logons persist, contact Citrix Technical Support for further assistance. For more information, see Contact Citrix Technical Support.

Check that profiles are being streamed

If you have enabled streamed user profiles and want to verify that this feature is being applied to a user’s profile, do the following:

  1. Check the following type of entry in the Profile Management log file:

    pre codeblock 2010-03-16;16:16:35.369;INFORMATION;;;;1140;ReadPolicy: Configuration value read from policy: PSEnabled=<1> <!--NeedCopy-->

    The last item must be set to PSEnabled=<1> if the feature is enabled.

  2. Check the following entry for the user in the Profile Management log file:

    pre codeblock 2010-03-16;20:17:30.401;INFORMATION;<domain name>;<user name>;2;2364;ProcessLogon: User logging on with Streamed Profile support enabled. <!--NeedCopy-->

    If streamed user profiles aren’t being applied, the item reads ProcessLogon: User logging on with Streamed Profile support disabled.

Determine which policies are in force

Use the UPMSettings.ini file to determine the Profile Management policies that are being applied. This file is present in the root folder of each Citrix user profile in the user store. Examining this file might be more convenient than using the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP). Doing so especially if you use a mixture of GPOs and .ini file settings to determine policies.

Use the UPMFRSettings.ini file to determine which profile folders aren’t processed because they are on an exclusion list. The UPMFRSettings.ini file is also present in the root folder.

Exclude corrupt profile data

If a user profile is corrupt and you’re confident the problem lies with a particular file or folder, exclude it from the synchronization process. The way is to add the file or folder to the exclusion list.

Clean connections to registry entries

In some scenarios (not just those involving Profile Management), connections to registry profile data are preserved after users log off. This preservation can result in slow logoffs or incomplete termination of user sessions. The User Profile Hive Cleanup (UPHClean) tool from Microsoft can help resolve these scenarios.

Delete local profiles

Microsoft Delprof.exe and Sepago Delprof2 are tools that help you delete user profiles.

Delete locked, cached profiles

If you use VMware software to create virtual desktops, but users’ cached profiles are locked and cannot be deleted, see Profile Management and VMware for troubleshooting information.

Identify where profiles are stored

Diagnosing profile issues can involve locating where the files in a user’s profiles are stored. The following procedure provides a quick way to identify where profiles are stored.

  1. In Event Viewer, click Application in the left pane.
  2. Under Source in the right pane, locate the Citrix Profile Management event of interest and double-click it.
  3. The path to the user store associated with the event is displayed as a link on the General tab.
  4. Follow the link to browse the user store if you want to explore the files.

Check servers

To determine whether a server is processing a user’s logons and logoffs correctly, check the file called PmCompatibility.ini in the user’s profile in the user store. The file is present in the profile’s root folder. The last entry in the file is the name of the server from which the user last logged off. For example, if the server runs Profile Management 5.0, the entry would be:

[LastUpdateServerName]
5.0=<computer name>
<!--NeedCopy-->

Roll back

To roll back to earlier versions of Profile Management, run del /s from the command line on the file server that hosts the user store. The command deletes the PmCompatibility.ini file from each profile. For example, if the local path to the user store is D:\UpmProfiles, run:

 del /s D:\UpmProfiles\pmcompatibility.ini
<!--NeedCopy-->

After the command has completed, users can log on to computers running the earlier version and receive their profile from the user store.

Profile Management running on VMware creates multiple profiles

Replicated VMware folders are created in user profiles. The replicates have incremented folder names (000, 001, 002, and so on). For more information about this issue and how to resolve it, see Knowledge Center article CTX122501.

Long logon times With Novell eDirectory

When users log on to an environment having Citrix products and Novell eDirectory, long logon times might be experienced and errors written to the event log. Sessions might become unresponsive for up to 30 seconds at the Applying your personal settings stage. For more information about this issue and how to resolve it, see Knowledge Center article CTX118595.

Excluded folders in user store

Excluded folders appear in the user store. This issue is expected and no corrective action is required. Folders on an exclusion list are created in the user store but their contents are not synchronized.

Missing information in log file

Activating debug mode does not automatically enable full logging. In log settings, verify that you’ve selected all check boxes for the events you want to log.

Tip: You might have to scroll down to enable the last check boxes on the list.

GPO settings inoperative

You change a GPO setting but it isn’t operative on the computer running the Citrix Profile Management Service. The issue occurs because GP does not refresh immediately but instead is based on events or intervals specified in your deployment. To refresh GP immediately, run gpupdate /force on the computer.

For your changes to take effect, run the gpupdate /force command from the command prompt as documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/gpupdate.

Users receive new or temporary profiles

By default, users are given a temporary profile when a problem occurred. For example, the user store is unavailable. Alternatively, you can configure Profile Management to display an error message and then log users off. This approach can help with troubleshooting.

For instructions on configuring this feature, see Force user logoffs.

In some circumstances, when they log on, users receive a new profile instead of their cached profile. For more information about this issue and a workaround for it, see Knowledge Center article CTX118226.

Users might also receive a temporary profile if a local profile is present after the copy in the user store is removed. This situation can arise if the user store is cleared but local profiles are not deleted at logoff.

Profile Management treats such partial removal of profiles as a network, share, or permissions error, and provides the user with a temporary profile. For this reason, partial removal isn’t recommended. To work around this issue, log on to the affected computer and delete the profile manually.

If your deployment includes personal vDisks, users might receive temporary profiles if the default processing of these disks hasn’t been correctly adjusted. For more information, see Migrate user profiles.

Profile data lost when virtual desktop sessions become unresponsive

In a Citrix virtual desktops deployment, disconnecting from a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session can cause a virtual desktop to become unresponsive or to restart. The behavior impacts Profile Management because it causes profile data to be lost when the session ends. The issue is fixed in Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent Version 3.1.3242 and later.

Users cannot log on (Event ID: 1000, Source: Userenv)

Users are unable to log on to a Citrix environment and receive the following error message: “Windows did not load your roaming profile and is attempting to log you on with your local profile… Contact your network administrator.” This error appears in Windows Application Event Logs (Event ID: 1000, Source: Userenv).

For more information about this issue and other workarounds for it, see Knowledge Center article CTX105618.

Printing

In Citrix virtual desktops environments, a user can select a default printer but sometimes the selection isn’t retained between logons. This issue has been observed when a Citrix virtual desktop’s policy is used to set printers on pooled virtual desktops based on a Citrix Provisioning Services Personal vDisk in standard image mode.

This issue does not originate with Profile Management. Though the Profile Management log file shows that the registry entry for the printer is copied at logoff (which is expected), NTUSER.dat for the user doesn’t contain the entry (which isn’t expected). The issue in fact originates with the way Citrix virtual desktops uses the DefaultPmFlags registry setting. For more information, see Knowledge Center article CTX119066.

Sometimes, unexpected printers are added to profiles. After users remove them, the printers reappear at the next logon. See the Profile Management support forum for more information.

Problems with application settings on multiple platforms

You might experience problems where application settings don’t roam correctly across multiple platforms. Typically these problems result from:

  • Settings that aren’t applicable from one system to another. For example, hardware-specific settings that are not on every system.
  • Applications that are installed differently on different systems. Examples:
    • An application that is installed on a C: drive on one system but on a D: drive on another.
    • An application that is installed in C:\Program Files on one system but in C:\Program Files (x86) on another.
    • An Excel add-in installed on one system but not on another.
  • Applications that don’t store setting information in the profile. For example, information stored in the local machine’s settings or outside the user profile.
  • Language-specific configuration settings stored in the registry. Profile Management automatically translates language-specific folder names in Version 1 profiles but not in the registry.

In most instances, better standardization of the systems that cause these issues can minimize the issues. However, often the issues result from inherent incompatibilities (with multiple platforms) of the OS or the respective application. If the problematic settings aren’t critical, excluding them from the profile might resolve the issue.

Profiles owned by unknown accounts

On rare occasions, a profile can appear to belong to an unknown account. On the Advanced tab of the System Properties dialog box for a computer, Account Unknown is displayed when you click Settings in User Profiles. This issue comes along with an event log entry, “Profile notification of event Create for component <application ID> failed, error code is???” In the registry, the application ID points to the SHACCT Profile Notification Handler, a Microsoft component.

To confirm that this issue occurs in your environment, log on as a user whose data Profile Management doesn’t process, and check for these symptoms.

It isn’t an issue with Profile Management but might be the result of Active Directory interacting badly with virtual machine snapshots. The operation of Citrix user profiles is unaffected. Users can log on and off, and their profile changes are preserved.

Troubleshoot common issues
March 15, 2023
Contributed by: 
L
March 15, 2023
Contributed by: 
L

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