While trying to deploy a Windows XP Pool yesterday, I hit upon this problem. Windows 7 works fine, but as soon as I tried to roll out a Windows XP pool, they stopped like this;
After a couple of hours, the whole operation timed out, and each machine shows as;
Status
{Date}{Time} o’clock {Time-Zone}:
Customization operation timed out
I tried to deploy the pool with both ‘quick prep’ and ‘sysprep’, but the results were the same. The replica is created, the pool creates the machines, but they DO NOT join the domain.
Solution
Despite my best efforts, I had to admit defeat and call VMware. Turns out they knew what the problem was straight away.
1. In my case the pool was going to be a linked clone pool. Go to the reference XP machine that you are using for this pool, and power it on.
2. Start > Run > appwiz.cpl {Enter}.
3. Locate and uninstall the VMware View Agent software.
6. Reboot the machine, (or the next step will fail and ask for a reboot!)
7. Reinstall the VMware View Agent.
8. Now if you are creating a linked clone pool, release the IP address > shut down the guest machine > snapshot the guest machine > recreate your pool.
Conclusion
VMware tell me that this is well documented in this kb article. But both at the time, and since, I’ve analysed the logs on the connection server, and the agent logs on the deployed machines, and found no mention of the following error,
“View Composer agent initialization state error (18): Failed to join the domain”
Hopefully this will help out someone stuck in the same position.
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Saw this a while ago, and just thought it was a “One Off”. Then on a visit to a client yesterday I saw it on both machines I was working on.
Solution
This might scare you, but you need to kill the update, don’t panic at this stage SP3 is already on.
Update 05/04/11: Before continuing please read the feedback below. Ive never personally seen any adverse effects from doing this and I’ve rolled out a few thousand service packs.
1. Right click your task bar and select “Task Manager”.
2. On the applications tab > Select the Software Update Installation Wizard > Click End Task > Accept any warnings etc.
3. Reboot the PC > SP3 installation will recover and finish, ignore any errors or warnings just let it boot up and you will be at SP3, at this point finish the good work by going to windows update and getting all the post SP3 updates.
Feedback from Patrick Wright (05/04/11)
I am sending you a message concerning your advice on the Windows XP SP3 install “hanging” at “Performing Cleanup…”. The advice you give is to end the installation task at this point and reboot the computer.
The truth of the matter is that during the “Performing Cleanup…” step, there is indeed quite a bit of activity and updating going on. I’ve had this step take as long as 6 hours on slower machines on our network but it finishes successfully.
For testing purposes, I tried your solution on three training machines that were still running SP2 and ran into numerous issues after rebooting with getting several programs to install that require a minimum of SP3–Adobe Standard/Professional 10 is only one example and will refuse to install on all three of the test machines that I tried your suggested fix on. It appears that even though Windows shows in system properties to be upgraded to SP3, it is not completely finished if you stopped the install prematurely by ending that task.
I strongly advise to consider changing your solution to simply wait out the “Performing Cleanup…” task until it finishes. It can take a while. I’ve found one way to help the process along is to set the process for the updater to “high priority” in task manager. This resulted in drastically faster install times when the installer seemed to “hang” at that part of the install.
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A few weeks back I was working on a Windows XP machine that had been infected with some rogue AV spyware, I was having no luck installing my usual cleaning tools so I booted to safe mode, I have a USB thumb drive that I keep a set of up to date AV/Spyware tools on for this very purpose, but the machine did not want to let me open it.
Solution
1. OK, I admit this is not really a “Fix”, more a work around, but lets be honest how often are you in safe mode accessing USB drives? I’m guessing the route of the problem is the removable storage process won’t be running and is set this way in safe mode. So rather than start hacking the registry to get that service started. Simply right click the drive and choose “Explore” (annoyingly simple eh!).
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Note this command assumes that you are using internet explorer as your browser, if not substitute your browser path and file details for those of iexplore.exe or use the Browser option of Task manager to locate it.
9) Click OK and your browser should start up and begin the download process
10) When prompted for the download Click run, the black screen fix program will download and run to automatically fix the issue.
11) Now restart your PC and the black screen problem will hopefully be gone.
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Spend any time working in windows and sooner or later something will upset Windows Explorer, and when it crashes it has a habit of taking something with it (usually your desktop experience – or something you’ve been working on and have not saved!).
The underlying problem can be anything from some poorly coded software, a dodgy device driver, or a wayward Windows update. But you can offset the problem by running Windows Explorer in its own sandboxed process, then if it does fail, it wont break anything else.
Warning there is a slight performance overhead to doing this but if you have a reasonable machine – crack on!
Solution
1. Open Windows Explorer (Windows Key +E)
2. Click Tools > Folder Options > View > Place a tick next to “Launch folder windows in a separate process” > Apply.
Note: If you can’t see the Tools Menu Press F10.
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Seen today on four brand new Windows 7 machines. Whenever you attempt to open the control panel, you see the error message, “Windows Explorer has stopped working”
And the event log yields no clues, it does log an Event ID 1000, but that does not seen to help much?
Solution
Essentially this error is caused by a .cpl file that Windows does not like, these are control panel applets (small programs), we use them all the time without realising it..
(from command line run “ncpa.cpl” without the quotes, you should see your network connections).
Anyway, to fix it:
1. First lets get a list of all our .cpl files, open a command window and issue the following two commands:
[box]cd c:windowssystem32<br /> dir *.cpl >>cplfiles.txt[/box]
2. Now using Windows explorer browse to C:windowssystem32 and locate the text file cplfiles.txt, open it in notepad.
3. This will show you all the cpl files in this folder, anyone of these could be the culprit. I’ve read some posts that say “double click each one and the one that crashes explorer is the culprit”, but for me THAT WAS NOT THE CASE! the offending .cpl file on my machine opened and ran without error. What I suggest you do is MOVE all the .cpl files to another folder, then move them back a few at a time, then open control panel, at the point it starts crashing again, the culprit was in the last batch you moved back.
4. The offender in my case was Firebird2control.cpl (Installed with Firebird database software) deleting this file did not appear to cause any harm to the Firebird product but check with your software vendor.
5. As soon as that file was removed from the System32 folder the problem ceased.
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This process was done with Windows 10, but the procedure is the same going all the way back to Windows 2000.
Solution
Note: The main reason this procedure fails, is because the client that you are attempting to perform the join from cannot resolve the domain name of your domain! Make sure it has one of your domain servers listed in the properties of its network connection, (or at least a method of resolving the name).
It’s been a while since I posted run through’s on WDS – they were on Server 2003, and were for deploying Windows XP.
I’ve completely re-written this page and shot a series of videos to make the process a little easier to understand.
Solution
Step 1 Notes
1. If the WDS Server is NOT the DHCP server then do NOT tick both the DHCP options, (as stated in the video), on your DHCP scope configure “DHCP Options” 66 and 67, like so;
2. If you are going to capture and deploy x64 Bit images you want to import the x64 bit boot.wim file from either the Windows 7 OR Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD (In the sources Directory).
Step 2 (Capture the Windows 7 Reference Machine).
Step 2 Notes
1. If your having trouble with talking to the WDS server over the network you may need to import the network drivers into the boot images on the WDS server, see here and here.
Computername > * (Note: Generates a random name). CopyProfile> true Registered Organization> Your Organisation Registered Owner> Your Owner ShowWindowsLive> false TimeZone> GMT Standard Time
Quite why each version of the vSphere client does not work with any other version of ESX/vCenter I’ve never really been able to work out. Being a mac owner, I have to run the software in VMware Fusion anyway, (which is also a pain).
So when I tried to connect my my own firms vCenter this week from my Windows 8 fusion VM, I got this error message, after having to download yet another version of the vSphere client.
Solution
In this case, Microsoft comes to the rescue,
1. Right click the installer executable > Properties.
2. Compatibility > Run This program in compatibility >Windows XP (Service Pack 3).
3. Apply > OK > run the setup process again.
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