Loadrunner Citrix and Remote Desktop Conflict – SOLVED

We have been working with a client for weeks to solve an issue with LoadRunner 9.52 that I am happy to report is now solved.

Problem: After creating a Citrix script in Vugen and getting a successful playback on a local machine, the script would be moved to the LoadRunner Controller to test it out with multiple virtual users. Sometimes the scripts would throw the error, “Failed to retrieve the ICA client Bitmap: Reason: The server threw an exception”. This happened for all ctrx_sync_on_windows functions on all scripts, but only in the Controller. The interesting thing is that the error occurred when using remote desktop (RDP) to get to the Controller (located in the data center) from specific machines. When we tried using RDP to a different machine, and then using that connection to RDP into the Controller (meaning two connections away), the problem would disappear.

Solution: There was a Remote Desktop client version difference between the machines that worked versus those that did not work. This appears to be a conflict with the RDP version that comes with SP3.

Research led us to this discussion thread that relates to the same issues that we were running into:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/itproxpsp/thread/e92f126d-caf6-4bdb-a45f-a0b99082f627/

There are two things to keep in mind:

1. The switch for connecting to console for Remote Desktop Connection has changed from mstsc /console to mstsc /admin with SP3. For SP2, you still need /console, as /admin is new.
2. When connecting to the console using Remote Desktops, you need to be aware of version number. The combination of SP3 and RDP version: 5.2.3790.0 have a bug in it. Even though you have the “connect to console” box checked, it is not recognized. However, with version 5.2.3790.3959, everything will work fine.

Special thanks to Ryan Furman and Prashant Satoskar for all their work on this.

UPDATE: On another machine this week, we found that a Widows XP machine had been upgraded to SP3. This caused Vugen 9.5 not to be able to launch an RDP session when recording. After troubleshooting using this article, we manually backed out of Remote Desktop version 6.1, replacing it with 6.0 and were able to record an RDP script. We basically replaced the MSTSC.exe and associated DLL’s and files with the old ones from another machine. Beware of conflicts with Windows XP SP3 when scripting RDP with Vugen 9.1 or 9.5 (including 9.52).