XPe/Office problems saving to USB Floppy Drives on thin-clients

[Michael Cox]

Hello,

We have recently setup a Win2k3 Terminal Server (no Citrix) and
Neoware XPEmbedded thin-clients for public access in our library. We
are having a problem with PowerPoint XP when trying to save to the
floppy disks (or any other local drive on the thin-client, such as a
memory key). I have them shortcuts to them on the desktop as "Floppy
Disk" and "USB Device" mapped to \\TSCLIENT\A and \\TSCLIENT\E, which
obviously point to a:\ and e:\ on the neoware client. The problem is
that when we attempt to save to them in PowerPoint XP we almost always
receive a "There was an error accessing \\TSCLIENT\A". This seems to
occur more often as the size of the file increases as saving works
correctly when it is just 3-4 slides, but around 5-6 and on the error
starts to occur. Also, the Floppy Drive icon will always show up on
the desktop, but when selecting the Desktop in the Save To... dialog
of PowerPoint XP only the USB Device will show up, not the Floppy
Drive, even though they are on the same place in the desktop. This
problem only occurs with PowerPoint XP as it is the only portion of
Office XP we have installed (our versions of Word/Excel/Publisher are
all 2000).

Although we seemed to have narrow down our problem to this: Saving
even semi-large (50-100k) files via Office (2000 or XP) from our
Neoware WinXPe thin clients to their locally connection USB floppy
drives seems to result in the "The was an error accessing ..." error
from Office. This has become a huge problem for us as we are a public
library and is seems as if none of the patrons can save! The clients
are connected over 100mbit ethernet and two cisco 3550 switches to a
fairly beefy/new server.

I have tried saving to the floppy drives via \\tsclient\A, and also
mapping that to A: and saving there but both result in the same error.
Is there a different way I should be mapping these floppy drives so
that uses may save to them? I'd tried applying all the updates to
office 2k/XP and no dice.

The strangest part is that if the document/presentation is saved to
the desktop and then copied to the floppy drive (via either address)
everything seems to work great, regardless of size.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as we seemed to have hit a
fairly common dead end here.

Thank you,

Michael Cox
IT Administrator
Saline District Library
Saline, MI USA

 

[KM]

Michael,

Beside the pretty common advise to contact your device manufacturer (Neoware?) I can only say that technically it may be a missing
dependency problem.
Not knowing anything about the XPe image configuration on the device would be hard to help anyway.

Btw, if the problem you described is local for the device why use a UNC path to the floppy?

However, what was not quite clear from your message is where you have the PowerPoint XP (MS Office) installed? Locally on thin
clients?
Then you should be aware that there are some legal restrictions having MS Office apps running on XPe.
I am not good on legal aspects of XPe so I'd also recommend you to consult with a lawyer.

 

[Paul]

Hello Michael

Just to clarify, your users are using an RDP session to connect to the
Terminal Server and hte PowerPoint is running on the 2003TS?

You have the Thin Client USB Key and FDD mapped to their TS user session,
and these are seen on the Desktop, but you get an error when you try to save
a big file directly to the FDD from the RDP session?

OR

You have Publisher XP local to the Thin Client (which as KM siad is a big no
no and Neoware should have told you this) and you are having issues saving
to the removable storage.

You can contact me offline if you want, we build a lot of XPe Thin Clients
and work with a lot of 2003 TS users and I would be happy to see what is
going on.

Cheers

Paul Tyler
Athena USA
www.athenausa.com
(e-mail address removed)
763-862-5905

Michael,

Beside the pretty common advise to contact your device manufacturer

(Neoware?) I can only say that technically it may be a missing

dependency problem.
Not knowing anything about the XPe image configuration on the device would be hard to help anyway.

Btw, if the problem you described is local for the device why use a UNC path to the floppy?

However, what was not quite clear from your message is where you have the

PowerPoint XP (MS Office) installed? Locally on thin

 

[Michael Cox]

Hello,

Our setup is the first situation. The XPe clients have no software
installed locally (at least not that's used) and are connected via RDP
to a 2003TS with PowerPoint XP installed. Yes, I have shortcuts to
the thin clients USB key and FDD on the desktop mapped to \\tsclient\E
and \\tsclient\A. The users do everything through their RDP session.
This seems to be a problem more consistantly with larger files, as
PowerPoint presentations with 1-2 slides save with no problems.

Thanks,

Michael Cox

 

[Paul]

Michael

Thanks that at least gives me an area to look. I will talk to my TS engineer
and see if he has any ideas.

Cheers

Paul Tyler
Athena USA

 

[Michael Cox]

Thank you very much. This problem is really driving us and our
patrons here at the library nuts.

Michael Cox
Saline District Library

 

[Rick Merrill]

Hello,

We have recently setup a Win2k3 Terminal Server (no Citrix) and
Neoware XPEmbedded thin-clients for public access in our library. We
are having a problem with PowerPoint XP when trying to save to the
floppy disks (or any other local drive on the thin-client, such as a
memory key). I have them shortcuts to them on the desktop as "Floppy
Disk" and "USB Device" mapped to \\TSCLIENT\A and \\TSCLIENT\E, which
obviously point to a:\ and e:\ on the neoware client. The problem is
that when we attempt to save to them in PowerPoint XP we almost always
receive a "There was an error accessing \\TSCLIENT\A". This seems to
occur more often as the size of the file increases as saving works
correctly when it is just 3-4 slides, but around 5-6 and on the error
starts to occur. Also, the Floppy Drive icon will always show up on
the desktop, but when selecting the Desktop in the Save To... dialog
of PowerPoint XP only the USB Device will show up, not the Floppy
Drive, even though they are on the same place in the desktop. This
problem only occurs with PowerPoint XP as it is the only portion of
Office XP we have installed (our versions of Word/Excel/Publisher are
all 2000).

Although we seemed to have narrow down our problem to this: Saving
even semi-large (50-100k) files via Office (2000 or XP) from our
Neoware WinXPe thin clients to their locally connection USB floppy
drives seems to result in the "The was an error accessing ..." error
from Office. ...

Sounds like a timing problem, doesn't it?

The strangest part is that if the document/presentation is saved to
the desktop and then copied to the floppy drive (via either address)
everything seems to work great, regardless of size.

And you don't want to let users save to desktop, rigth?

 

[Michael Cox]

Hello,

It's quite possible that it is some kind of memory/timing issue, but
we have been unable to figure out what it is exactly or where to go
from here.

We do currently allow users to save to the desktop since they are
using mandatory profiles which reset the desktop when they
logoff/logon anyway. But we would much rather they be able to work
directly from the floppy like they did on our previous PCs (prior to
the thin clients) as this is a public library and our "users" are
transient patrons, meaning we would need to tell almost all of them to
work from the desktop and then save to the floppy afterwards.

Thank you,

Michael Cox
Saline District Library

 

[Rick Merrill]

Hello,

It's quite possible that it is some kind of memory/timing issue, but
we have been unable to figure out what it is exactly or where to go
from here.

Since you have remotely mounted drives (If I read it correctly) that
could cause a slow start in the "save to ..." dialog. Can you not let
the floppy be a local device or even a USB floppy?

 

[Paul]

Just to let you know I think this is a TS thing as I am able to mimic this
error on a WIN CE.NET machine of mine here at my lab. I will try a couple
things to see what is going on.

 

[Michael Cox]

Hello,

Correct. We are currently using USB Floppy Drives connected to the
XPe thin clients. The problem lies in the fact that these drives are
not working with large files in Microsoft Office when attempting to
write to the drive/disk. I have tried saving to the floppy drives as
both \\tsclient\D and mapping \\tsclient\d to a: and saving to that,
both produce the same results. The "save to..." dialog comes up
quickly like it should, but when "save" is pressed an error message
occurs saying "there was an error accessing ..."

Thanks,

Michael Cox

 

[Michael Cox]

Hello Paul,

Thanks for the heads up. Glad to hear that someone else is able to
mimic this problem/error. We also encountered this problem with our
old Win CE machines, but it has definitely occured much more often
with the XPe clients. Hopefully we'll be able to find out the cause
to this and a workable solution.

Thanks for the help,

Michael Cox

 

[Paul]

Hello Michael

I am working on the issue still, I have pushed it up the pipe line as I am
sure it is going to cause some calls into our support desk too as we have
several people using USB Drives over RDP. When I have an answer I will let
you know.

Cheers

paul
Athena USA

 

[Graham Prentice]

Michael,

I'm in the middle of running the same kind of environment here.
We have a public library with 150 x HP t5700 thin clients and WinXPe.
We are planning on running RDP client to Win2003 MSAD environment (Using
Netloan software).
The environment will be made available to the public in about a months time.
While testing, I ran across issues with the RDP client that came standard on
the thin clients.
The bar at the top of the session couldn't be hidden - even when selected.
The problem turned out to be the version of the RDP client.
The fix was to borrow msrdp from a WinXP Pro SP1 workstation.
I have also borrowed schtasks.exe and other files from WinXPpro to make this
work properly.

What I am getting at is that you may want to try another RDP client.
I will try this in our environment tomorrow (we have Office2003) with
PowerPoint.
We offer our library patrons 50mb hard disk space as well as USB keys at
cost.
At one point we tried MSRDP from WinXPpro SP2 on our WinXPe thin clients -
but it had other minor issues with mapping the USB ports.

If you have any full PCs around, try the RDP client / USB floppy / Power
Point save from there to try to isolate the problem.

Good luck,

Graham

 

[Graham Prentice]

Have the same problem here.
Tried Office2003 sp1 using PowerPoint and file = 700kb.
Using WinXPe thin clients HP t5700 and Server = Win2003 Enterprise Ed.
terminal services
Saved to USB key using mapped drive =fails.
Saved to USB key using UNC path =fails.

This is what's interesting:
Tried same thing (saving 700kb powerpoint pres.) to USB key on my full WinXP
pro SP2 workstation - and it worked properly!!!

Whether it's related to XPe sp2????

SP2 for WinXPe is coming out very soon....today?
Regards,
Graham

 

[Graham Prentice]

I forgot to mention that I was using an RDP client to terminal server
connection as well on my WinXP proSP2 machine when the term server session
PowerPoint save to my USB key worked properly.

Graham

 

[michael]

Thanks Paul,

I believe I've managed to find out what is the source of the problem.
When I first received the XPe devices they had an RDP client version
5.2 (unsure of the build) which had the "connection bar won't disappear
no matter what setting you checked" bug. Therefore before I even
hooked up the USB drives I replaced the mstdc.exe and subsequent DLL
(I'd have to look for the name) under windows\system32 with the RDP
client from a Windows XP SP1 machine. This fixed the connection bar
bug but is apparantly the cause of the USB/RDP problem. I replaced
this client with the original RDP client that came with XPe SP1 and
although it has the connection bar problem USB drives seem to work
correctly in all programs. Now I just need to find a version of the
RDP client that has both: the fix for the connection bar bug (all
recent RDP clients have this) and doesn't cause the USB bug.
Apparantly Windows XPe SP2 has gone gold and either has been recently
released or is soon to be, so I'll have to contact Neoware about the
availability of that. My only concern with upgrading to XPe SP2 is
whether is will overwrite the customizations I have done. I am unsure
if it is a drive image upgrade or if it is upgraded in the same method
as standard Windows XP (which would not overwrite the settings). With
any hope the RDP client from XPe SP2 will be able to write to USB
devices properly and not have the connection bar bug.

Thanks again, this thread (and the one further down) have been a great
help.

Michael Cox

 

[michael]

Thanks Paul,

I believe I've managed to find out what is the source of the problem.
When I first received the XPe devices they had an RDP client version
5.2 (unsure of the build) which had the "connection bar won't disappear
no matter what setting you checked" bug. Therefore before I even
hooked up the USB drives I replaced the mstdc.exe and subsequent DLL
(I'd have to look for the name) under windows\system32 with the RDP
client from a Windows XP SP1 machine. This fixed the connection bar
bug but is apparantly the cause of the USB/RDP problem. I replaced
this client with the original RDP client that came with XPe SP1 and
although it has the connection bar problem USB drives seem to work
correctly in all programs. Now I just need to find a version of the
RDP client that has both: the fix for the connection bar bug (all
recent RDP clients have this) and doesn't cause the USB bug.
Apparantly Windows XPe SP2 has gone gold and either has been recently
released or is soon to be, so I'll have to contact Neoware about the
availability of that. My only concern with upgrading to XPe SP2 is
whether is will overwrite the customizations I have done. I am unsure
if it is a drive image upgrade or if it is upgraded in the same method
as standard Windows XP (which would not overwrite the settings). With
any hope the RDP client from XPe SP2 will be able to write to USB
devices properly and not have the connection bar bug.

Thanks again, this thread (and the one further down) have been a great
help.

Michael Cox