COMMAND
MS Office
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
Win TSE
PROBLEM
Andy Stadelmann found following. This might not be a security
related bug but still a bug people need to be aware of. During
the Off2K-SR1 setup on both Windows 2000 Server, he came across
the following problem within Windows 2000 Terminal Service.
The procedure to "Installing Office 2000 in a Windows Terminal
Server Environment" states the following procedure.
To point users to your customized settings
1. On the Start menu, click Run, and type regedit.exe to open
the Windows Registry Editor.
2. Create a new subkey named RunOnce in the following subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version
3. In the RunOnce subkey, create a new entry with a string
value and any value name.
4. Set the value of the new entry to the following:
path\Proflwiz.exe /r file /q
where path is the fully qualified path to the Profile Wizard, and
file is the file name and fully qualified path to the OPS file
you created. When users log on to the Terminal Server computer,
Windows runs the Profile Wizard using the command line in the
RunOnce subkey and restores the settings you saved in the OPS
file. This command runs one time for each user the first time
the user logs on to the Terminal Server computer.
That's where the problem started. For some reason Windows 2000
Terminal Service behaves differently to WTS 4.0 and does NOT copy
the registry entries from
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software
to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software
The following procedure describes how this was working under WTS
4.0 and should also work under Win2K TS.
Extract from Microsoft White Paper "Optimizing Applications for
Windows 2000 Terminal Services and Windows NT Server 4.0,
Terminal Server Edition". To enable each user to retain individual
application settings, he or she must have a unique copy of the
appropriate .ini files or registry entries. To accomplish this,
Terminal Services replicates the .ini files and registry entries
from a common system location to each user as necessary. For .ini
files, this means that the .ini files in the system directory
(%systemroot%) will be copied to each user's Windows directory.
For registry entries, the registry entries will be copied from
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software
to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software
End of extract.
As a test Andz created a Run subkey in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version
on a WTS4.0 server with a new string value name of test and the
value data c: \winnt\notepad.exe in it . The setting got copied
across to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run
after logging in again and the application (i.e Notepad) started
fine. If You do this under Windows 2000 nothing gets copied to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software and the application does not run on
user logon. Andz tried the install and the execute mode.
He has tested this on two servers both running Windows 2000 Server
SP1 with the Terminal Service running in Application Mode. He has
checked and modified security settings on source and destination
keys in the Win2K registry to EVERYONE Full Control with no
success.
SOLUTION
This issue was reported back to Microsoft on the 9th of June 2000
with the only comment so far being, the document "Installing
Office 2000 in a Windows Terminal Server Environment" will be
corrected as a document bug! Andy's comments that this has
nothing to do with Off2K but looks like a bug with the 2000
Terminal Service seem to get lost.