App-V: Unable to click “Join Meeting” from Virtualized Outlook when Live Meeting 2007 is Installed Locally

If you have virtualized MS Office and have decided to use a local installation of Live Meeting, you may run into this issue. When a user attempts to click on a Live Meeting link (click on “Join Meeting” link) within a virtualized Office application (primarily Outlook) to join the Live Meeting session, they may get the following error:

Failed to initialize critical resources!

Make sure you have all languages installed.

This was caused by the Office application process not having Read permissions as part of the sequencing to the following directory:

 %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Office\Live Meeting 8\Console

If Live Meeting is not going to be included with the package, it will need to at least be installed on the sequencing machine in order to correct this in advance otherwise, you will need to enable the <LOCAL_INTERACTION_ALLOWED> tag in the OSD and ensure the directory “Live meeting” does not exist.

Random STOP (BSOD) crashes with Forefront Endpoint Protection and App-V 4.5

You may receive random STOP (BSOD) crashes with Forefront Endpoint Protection and App-V 4.5 and later. The frequency increases with Virtualized Outlook 2007.

The problem was caused indirectly by Forefront but Forefront is not entirely at fault here. If you have Forefront Endpoint Protection installed but do not exclude PSTs nor PKG files from Forefront real-time scanning, then you might run into this issue.

This is difficult to nail down due to the STOP Error. The STOP 0xDF bugcheck is referenced here:

MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms854947.aspx

Explanation:  This Stop message occurs when a user-mode subsystem, such as Winlogon or the Client Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS), is seriously compromised and security can no longer be guaranteed. The operating system switches into kernel-mode and generates this error. Because Windows 2000 cannot run without Winlogon or CSRSS, this is one of the few situations where the failure of a user-mode service can shut down the system. Running the kernel debugger is not useful in this situation because the actual error occurred in a user-mode process. Because this Stop message occurs in a user-mode process, the most common culprits are third-party applications. Other common causes of this message are the installation of a new or updated device driver, or system service. Mismatched system files can also cause this error. Running a full system restore from tape might generate this error, because( some restore programs might skip restoring system files they determine are in use).

With Windows XP, Forefront hooks in through GINA chaining and user mode hooking and so does App-V 4.5 and later. If PKG files are being scanned by Forefront and PSTs are going to them, this creates a nightmare scenario for functionality if PKGs and PSTs are not excluded from FCS.

PLEASE NOTE: This problem only occurs on Windows XP with FCS and App-V installed. It has only been reproduced with that configuration and the only application we could get to reproduce virtually was Outlook and that was with PSTs inside of PKG files (not recommended) or server-based PSTs (also not recommended.)

The only resolution for this is to ensure you create exclusions for PSTs and PKG files using Forefront. Please refer to this link for instructions on how to do this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb418942.aspx