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We had an ongoing problem with GoToAssist Express on two systems, an original and a clone of the original, where we couldn't get both of them back into a functional state with GoToAssist Express Customer on both systems. These are Windows XP systems, and we didn't initially realize the cloning process had anything to do with the problem. GoToAssist was on the original system before the cloning process, and after the cloning process, only the cloned system was recognized by GTA Express support console.
CAUTION: The following discusses modifying the registry. Do not attempt unless you have a backup and/or know what you are doing. Incorrectly modifying the registry can cause irreparable damage to the OS to the point where it may no longer be able to start.
We tried uninstalling GTA from both systems and re-installing, but that didn't work. Whichever system was the last system to have GTA installed was the only one that would be recognized as a GTA client. Even after uninstalling the app and removing all registry entries with GoToAssist, still no joy.
After several calls to Citrix tech support for GoToAssist, with no one seeming to know how to resolve it, we finally ran into one technician that said "It can't be done. This is a known issue and many people have complained, so we are considering a way to fix this." This sounded fishy, especially because I did it once before, but I didn't think much about documenting what I did at the time because my resolution at the time was quick and worked. I moved on.
Now it came up again, but it had been too long to remember exactly what I did, and we finally found the resolution. We were two-thirds of the way there. Uninstall GTA, remove all registry entries with "GoToAssist" *AND* "g2ax" (where it obviously related to GoToAssist, being careful not remove anything that didn't also have some reference to GTA.)
Voila! Success!
4 comments:
Thanks for this post I have the same problem. We installed and setup GotoAssist unattended access on our original XP machine and then cloned it to 6 other machines. Once in the field we discovered that we could only connect to the last one that was setup. I got the same answer as you from tech support.... "We are working on a solution"
So just deleting the registry entries doesn't work?
Did you run SysPrep on the cloned machines or did you run it on the original and then clone them again?
Thanks so much!
Jack, thanks for the feedback. We actually did it both ways. After uninstalling GTA on two of the problem systems, we did sysprep one and then pushed that image to three other systems, and then reinstalled GTA to verify it worked on all three - it did. Then for one of the problem systems we just syspreped it and then started it back up again. Reinstalling GTA worked as expected, so now all work correctly.
The rest of the story is, yes, deleting registry entries did work......once. But we couldn't reliably reproduce that success. The one time I did it successfully, I had plenty of time to sift through the registry, delete files and folders, and so on. And those two systems are still working correctly today. But I didn't document all the variations of what I did, (you know how it is when you are troubleshooting, a lot of trial and error), but I thought I knew what solved it, removing the additional reg entries, so we tried it again later and at first thought it worked, but it didn't.
So now our new process is to verify GTA is uninstalled first! I'm hoping that resolves this mess because when we push images to dissimilar hardware, it can sometimes be a pain with XP to get all the drivers reinstalled. I can't wait until we can switch to Win 7. That looks so much better.
Note: If you EVER installed the Remote Support agent on your "golden image" (source of your copies), then you MUST remove the following UUID setting in registry the new installs on each PC can generate a unique ID. In other words, by design, the uninstall does not remove this nor does a new install change this.
HKLM\software\citrix\GoToManage (note: yes this uses the previous name for this product) (note: If you have 64 bit windows, it's HKLM\software\wow6432node\citrix\GoToManage)
UUID=XXXX-XXX-XXXX-XXXX
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