Hello -
We are currently in the process of finishing the configuration of a terminal server running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. We have most of the necessary applications needed for terminal server users, save Spark. After installing Spark via a domain administrator account, spark loads and runs fine from that account, and any other domain admin account. When logging on as a regular user, Spark would not start. We ran ProcMon to see what was happening and to my absolute confusion, ProcMon listed many ACCESS DENIED operations resulting from spark.exe when it attempted to access “C:\UsersAdministrator” - and various subfolders of that folder (primarily c:\Users\Administrator\Spark). Here are the peices of the puzzle:
1: Regular users (the ones getting errors) do not have access to the C:\ Drive except their own profiles and the temp folder
2: Spark was installed using a domain admin account we’ll call DOMAINADMIN, yet spark is trying to access the C:\Users\Administrator\ folder regardless of what account you are logged in as.
Shouldn’t Spark be trying to access the Spark folder in the current users profile folder and not Administrator?
Thank you all in advance.
Spark should access the users profile not some other folder. This has been a very common issue with the 2.5.8 build. I made my own msi installer which for whatever reason did not have this issue for me. You can download the installer to try it from here:
http://www.mtstravel2.com/downloads/spark_2_5_8_online.msi
The MSI did not work, but thank you for the effort.
I have, however, narrowed the issue even further.
When Spark launches, it grabs several variables via the registry in order to place the user files correctly.
In Windows XP, this Primary key is located at:
HKEY_USERS{the users GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer*Shell Folders*
In Vista, they are located here:
HKEY_USERS{the users GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer*User Shell Folders*
The “Shell Folders” key is kept for legacy software compatibility.
Spark seems to reference most of the new keys correctly, however, it is still pointing to ONE old key as far as I can tell, which is the “Dektop” value.
To sum it up:
Spark seems to, for some reason, reference the Desktop key as a base directory to navigate down to the users home folder. Is this a glitch? I changed the value of that key to a realtive path (%USERPROFILE%) and Spark immediately started working for that user. Can anyone confirm this? Is there a way to generate an MSI that references the “User Shell Folder” key exclusively?