More Reasons to Get SP5 for TSE

Since releasing Service Pack 5 (SP5) for Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (TSE) a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft has posted dozens of related articles to its Web site. Microsoft Support Online article Q240331 lists all the problems that SP5 fixes. The following Microsoft Support Online articles address some of the most important or threatening problems that SP5 fixes:

• Article Q230558: If a user starts a macro and then disconnects from the terminal server session, either the macro or explorer.exe controls nearly 100 percent of the server’s CPU time. You can’t kill the process from the server or reset the connection—you must reboot the server. If you don’t reboot the server, it will eventually crash. This problem happens with both RDP and ICA connections, although according to the article, it’s worse with RDP.
• Article Q242983: TSE crashes when you attempt to connect to the server using the Web ICA client and the Netscape Communicator Web browser.
• Article Q230168: When you use a third-party user-mode printer driver to print, the print job doesn’t work and the server might hang. When you print to a file, the resulting file size is 0KB. The article describes how to check the Registry to see whether the third-party printer driver is running in user mode. TSE doesn’t support user-mode printer drivers.
• Article Q240992: When you log on to a TSE server, you might get an access violation in userinit.exe. When you click OK or Cancel on the access violation dialog box, the session disconnects. You can either work around this problem by editing the Registry to remove the invalid Registry value, or you can apply SP5.
• Article Q237566: %HOMEDRIVE%, %HOMEPATH%, and %HOMESHARE% don't resolve correctly when you’re using Dfs.
• Article Q238070: If you’ve installed a printer driver that’s incompatible with TSE, the TSE server might hang or crash if multiple users simultaneously connect to the remote printer using the driver and try to print.
• Article Q236988: You use the Net User command or User Manager for Domains on Windows NT Server to create a user account, and when you attempt to modify the user's TSE profile path using the Tsprof command, you receive the error message "Failed getting User Configuration, Error = 2 (0x2)."
• Article Q236794: A buggy tcpip.sys driver can cause ntoskrnl.exe to crash TSE.
• Article Q236405: The Terminal Server License Service might not start on February 29, 2000. This bug won’t prevent people from logging on to the TSE server, but TSE won’t be able to monitor license usage unless the service is running.
• Article Q236059: Opening and closing dialog boxes in an RDP TSE session causes memory leaks that can eventually shut down the TSE server. The close function doesn’t free memory that the system has allocated to the process of opening dialog boxes.
• Article Q235567: Query User doesn’t find the person whose username you provided because the command assumes that the request is local. Apply the workarounds that the article describes or install SP5.
• Article Q230279: When you download a corrupt profile from the central server, error 1009 logs in the System Event Log. The system then creates a new local profile from the local default setting. However, the user's computer doesn’t reference the new local profile after the user restarts your computer, and the system begins the cycle of loading the corrupted profile from the server again. You’ll see the error message "The system cannot find the drive specified." This problem occurs when TSE detects a certain type of profile corruption. TSE sets a flag, and because of that flag, the server doesn’t save a reference to the newly created user profile in the Registry. The user receives a new copy of the local default profile and can make changes to the profile and save the changes to the hard disk. When the user restarts the computer, it searches the Registry to compare the timestamp of the locally stored profile with that on the server so it can be sure to use the right one. But the newly created and locally stored copies won’t appear in the Registry, so the server will attempt to download the corrupted profile again, restarting the entire cycle.
• Article Q229789: The TSE server always contacts the PDC for user authentication instead of querying any available domain controller.
• Article Q194812: When connected through the Citrix ICA Windows client, other users' printers appear in the Printers folder, in addition to your printers. When you try to access one of the other printers, you might receive the error message "You do not have access to this printer." Only the Security tab will display.
• Article Q194829: More than nine Dfs users on a TSE server can’t reconnect to their Dfs shares or to Dfs mapped drives when you create a logon script containing a Net Use command connecting to a Dfs share or map a drive to the Dfs share and have the drive reconnect at logon.