This will be a pretty brief post. Back in 2011, I posted my own tips for troubleshooting application issues in App-V. Thanks for the contributions of many others since the release of App-V 5.0. I have less work to do 🙂

You’ve got an issue with an App-V Package? What should be your first port of call?

1.) My suggestion, the very, very first thing you should do is go to your sequencers report:

Open it up and take a look. If your application didn’t work, perhaps the report contains the answer e.g. Did the sequencer identify COM+ or Drivers etc.? Did it exclude files required for the application to function?

2.) Quick Investigation

If it’s not obvious from the report. Why not do a quick Search online to see if anybody else encountered the same issue as you. If not, proceed to the next step.

3.) Expand Package to the Local System

Open your application with the sequencer (To Edit)

Go to Tools–>Expand Package to Local System..

Browse to the .appv file of your package

The application should now be on the machine. Test it. If it works when expanded but not when tested on your client. It’s either due to something missing on the client machine that is on the sequencer (not likely if using a vanilla sequencer VM) OR there’s an issue when the application is isolated.

4.) Test the App-V package on the sequencer VM

To rule out a missing local resource you may want to try installing the App-V client on your sequencing VM and trying the App-V package on that machine.

5.) Deep Dive Analysis

Re-create the issue and use a tool like ProcMon. For info on using ProcMon for App-V Troubleshooting, I suggest you check out this great tutorial:

Some other tools that I suggest you try out include Tim Mangans great AppV Manage tool, the ever great AVE tool and the newly FREE SpyStudio. I plan to post some posts about these tools by themselves. This post is designed to be more of an overview. Point you in some direction for your own research.

Speaking of SpyStudio. Something I have done quite frequently is use SpyStudio to compare two ProcMon traces. I might attempt a ProcMon on a local install of the application which works and then a ProcMon of the virtualized package that doesn’t work. Go into SpyStudio and do a comparison and easily see what’s different. For more check out this: HERE

You may find a simple fix like installing a pre-req locally rather than as part of the sequenced package (works for SQL 2012), Exclude folder, Don’t capture the launch, fix a file path issue etc.

6.) Post your problem on the App-V TechNet Forums (Thanks Vinod Reddy for pointing out that I missed this!)

7.) Plan B

At this point, I’m assuming you’ve exhausted your investigation attempts. At this point you could try to involve the vendor. More and more vendors are actually willing to help try to figure out how to get their application to work in App-V as many Enterprise users are looking for this support.

If all else fails. You may need forget App-V and handle this application in a different way.

To read about general IT problem solving, check out the article HERE.