MED-V 1.0: Workspace Fails to Start with “Adjusting VM Window” Message

Has this ever happened to you?

You receive the following error when attempting to launch a MED-V workspace.

“Failed to start Workspace ‘Workspace_name’

“Starting the session failed in the following phase: Adjusting VM Window.”

This issue can arise if there is a dialog box triggered from Virtual PC. This issue has been seen happening with first-time deployments that also involve first time launching of the Virtual PC engine.

A common specific cause of this is found on Windows Vista and Windows 7 where their is an underlying firewall alert that does not appear within regular user contexts but will display immediately with an administrative account. You will see the following message:

“Windows Firewall has blocked some features of this program”

“Windows Firewall has blocked some features of Virtual PC 2007 SP1 on all public, private, and domain networks.”

If you find that when starting the workspace from an Administrative account you get this error, you can enable firewall exemptions for the Virtual PC 2007 SP1 program through the Windows Security Alert dialog box. Once this has been done, a re-attempt of the workspace launch should not get this error again.

A more proactive approach would be to push these firewall exemption rules down via group policy or pre-launch the Virtual PC Console on the workstation as an Administrator and that will also trigger this alert.