A resource for troubleshooting System Center Configuration Manager (Current Branch) and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Task Sequence failures through analysis of errors reported in the smsts.log file. When an SCCM task sequence fails, errors are written to the smsts.log file. Sometimes the error is descriptive and it’s possible to quickly identify the cause of […]

This Windows Event Viewer query looks through the Network Profile/Operational log for network connection events (EventID=10000) where the “Category” equals “2”, which equates to “Domain Authenticated”. The neat part about this XML query is that it looks into the event details for additional criteria, which isn’t available through the filter GUI. I use it as […]

Update 8/12/2015: I’ve determined that the problem is due to my attempts at creating a custom Windows.UI.Logon.pri file to display a logon screen background image. Neither the utility nor the PowerShell script referenced below create a Windows.UI.Logon.pri file that is acceptable to Windows. In the meantime, I’ve decided to just eliminate the “Hero” wallpaper in […]

I recently worked with Microsoft to resolve a problem in our Windows 8.1 environment where Group Policy Preference Drive Mappings to shares on the DFS were failing when users logged in immediately after a computer restart. Through the use of procmon boot logging, we were able to identify that the ApplySettingsTemplateCatalog.exe process, which is part […]

This is just a quick post on creating a operating system-based collection query rule for Windows 10 in SCCM 2012. In preparation for the release of Windows 10, I have been working on an OSD task sequence that applies the Windows 10 Enterprise Insider Preview and creating collections in SCCM. There are a number of […]

This article is intended for systems administrators who use Group Policy/Group Policy Preferences to manage computers in a domain environment. Among the many challenges faced by Windows desktop engineers, configuring Internet Explorer in a corporate environment to provide a good balance of security and convenience stands out as particularly difficult to get right. I cannot […]

Late in 2014, I ran into a problem installing Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8.1 Enterprise with Update (x64) through an SCCM 2012 R2 Build and Capture task sequence. I was following Microsoft’s instructions at Installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8 or 8.1 to first copy the sources\sxs directory from the Windows […]

A problem arises in Citrix when Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) is specified as a launch method for a file type in OpenText eDOCS DM and the full path to the executable is not specified. For example, assume that Microsoft Visio Viewer 2010 or Visio Viewer 2013 is installed on a Citrix server and Internet Explorer is […]

Microsoft Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2984976), titled RDP 8.0 update for restricted administration on Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and released on October 14, 2014, as one of that month’s Patch Tuesday updates, appears to cause multiple restarts when applied during the Install Software Updates step within a System […]