PowerPoint causes 100% CPU usage in a seamless XenDesktop session

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

Office 2010 SP1 To Be Released Soon

Microsoft is planning on releasing Office 2010 Service Pack 1 at the end of June 2011. SP1 will be available for all 40 SKU languages of Office. Each product in the suite will have updates included in SP1 and as always they will be cumulative. For a list of some of the highlights check out the Office Sustained Engineering blog.

Update: Microsoft has released Office 2010 SP1 http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26622

Office 2010 and the Dell OMCI client

When I first started to deploy Windows 7 using ConfigMgr our task sequence included Office 2010 Professional Plus. Early on I noticed that during the deployment Office 2010 would never get installed yet all other application were. All of my image development is done using Hyper-V (which worked without issue) and this only occurred on physical machines. After going over countless ConfigMgr logs, recreating task sequences and internet searches I found a random post mentioning that the Dell OMCI client changes permissions on two folders:

C:\Windows\System32\winevt
C:\Windows\System32\winevt\Logs

The permission change on these two folders can also prevent Office 2010 from installing. Once I moved the Dell OMCI install to the end of the task sequence so that it installed after Office 2010 I had no issues.