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Being able to get in and out of a remote session at will is something we take for granted. Recently one of our customers ran into a scenario where their Motorola MC9190-G handheld scanner was unable to log out properly. The handheld apparently closed all applications but left the session hanging and all that was visible was a blue screen. The customer had to manually kill that remote session to be able to free the device. Not very convenient in a busy environment!

We were able to duplicate the “unable to logoff issue” on one of our Citrix-virtualized testing servers and the root cause was a certain Citrix process remaining in memory. According to Citrix, this is a Microsoft problem.

In our case we had a virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 inside a Citrix XenServer 6 and a process called wfshell.exe was remaining in memory making the handheld’s remote session unable to log off. So, we added the problematic exe into the following Windows Registry key: HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTerminal ServerSysprocs (as suggested in the link below) and now our remote session logs off just fine.

Read more from the Citrix Support Forum:

“I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks looking at this issue for a client on a new XenApp 6.5 farm. I found that the problem occurred on only a few of the servers so believe it is an application/component/hotfix causing the issue, but my testing could not narrow it down. A client build from scratch did however resolve the issue, but just before we embarked on a full farm rebuild I logged a case with Citrix and they have provided a workaround which works perfectly in this instance; hopefully it will help others too.

Citrix Tech support believes it is a Microsoft issue – we did test an RDP connection with a Notepad specified as the program to run on connection and we saw the exact same behaviour.

The workaround provided is to add wfshell.exe to the following registry key: HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTerminal ServerSysprocs – as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2513330.”