A Quick ThinApp Troubleshooting Tip

Sean Crookston — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:00:08 +0000

This is a quick and easy method for troubleshooting ThinApp applications that do not shut down properly. Using all the advanced log tracing at times is more complex for some people who are just casually and occasionally building ThinApp packages.

In Windows task manager you can add a column for Command Line, which will show the path to the file being run. By doing this you will often see several different instances of application xyz.exe, all with different paths. When a ThinApp fails to shutdown you will often find that it is a component such as an application update or something like .net that is hung.

To resolve an issue with an application that has a hung process causing it to fail:

Clear the sandbox(by default %appdata%/thinstall/appname)
Create troubleshooting entry points. Make sure the 3 entry points below are not disabled.
[cmd.exe]
Source=%SystemSystem%\cmd.exe
Shortcut=app.exe

[regedit.exe]
Source=%SystemRoot%\regedit.exe
Shortcut=app.exe

[iexplore.exe]
Source=%ProgramFilesDir%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe
Shortcut=app.exe
Rebuild the package and relaunch. Attempt to shut down the application again and confirm it is still hung.
Target the hung process as your issue. This is step with general direction as each application will have a different fix. I’ll give two examples though.
1-Application showed .net 2.0 was running for the hung process. I browsed to %systemsystem% in the project directory and deleted the three .dll files related to .net 2.0. I then relaunched the application and ran it on a system that already had .net 2.0 and it worked great. I should note this was a package that I had issues with running on Windows 7 after capturing on XP and this article really got me thinking towards this resolution.
2- Application showed that its own update was hung. I had never used this application and could not find a setting to disable automatic updates in the application. This is a best practice step that should be taken for all ThinApps so I accessed the registry through the regedit.exe entry point I had created for troubleshooting. I browsed to the services portion of the registry and set this process to disabled.

And again this is just a potentially quick way to resolve some common issues you might see. If you regularly use ThinApp or you are not able to very quickly resolve issues with the above mentioned I’d recommend you go here for more advanced troubleshooting steps. If you are able to get this to work just use the sbmerge command to merge the sandbox into the package and rebuild the package.

Sean Crookston » Troubleshooting

A Quick ThinApp Troubleshooting Tip