For last couple of days I’ve been trying to determine the root cause of a problem that I was having with PowerPoint and XenDesktop. The scenario was a Windows XP workstation with Office 2010 being launched in a seamless XenDesktop 5.0 SP1 session on a dual monitor machine. Whenever I opened PowerPoint it would cause Explorer.exe to use 100% CPU and render the virtual machine useless. The issue did not occur if I started PowerPoint in safe mode. After much trial and error and countless searches online I came across the following Citrix article that was just published – CTX132436. It’s not the exact setup that I had but it did bring to attention the Disable hardware graphics acceleration setting in the Advanced options of PowerPoint. Once I enabled this option PowerPoint could open in a seamless session without pinning the CPU.
This setting is a per-user setting so you will need to apply
it to every user that logs on. To deploy this via GPO you will need
to download the Office 2010 ADM, ADMX/ADML files from here.
Once you have downloaded and installed them, (Note if you use ADM files you’ll need to
add them to your policy using Add/remove Templates from within the GPO) open
your GPO editor
- Navigate to User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2010\Miscellaneous
- Set Do not use hardware graphics acceleration to Enabled
