It never fails. Nice long relaxing weekend planned and what do I get? Calls from users at work because of problems. One of the problems was related to a change we made Friday afternoon (shame on us) but I was able to resolve that one remotely after 15 minutes of work. The other one, was a bit more difficult.
The users were complaining about slowness with Internet Explorer. First thought, of course, is problems with the T’s we have for Internet, but I was remoted in on those same lines and Solarwinds wasn’t reporting anything. I thought back to anything we did recently but nothing stuck out. IE8 was rolled out the beginning of April, patches were done the end of April, we upgraded Citrix to the newest “receiver” version two weeks ago and we just rolled out a new network drive using a GPO on Friday (I ruled this out as it was a simple batch file). Since the problem was sporadic and because I was losing my guinea pigs since it was 9:00 PM and closing time I made a midnight run into the office.
After spending a couple hours looking into everything and loading up IE with no Addon’s (I LOVE this feature) I figured out it was an addon causing the issue. I started going through and disabling one at a time until I got to a new one I hadn’t seen before, “CtxIEInterceptorBHO Class”. Disable that one, BAM, IE is back to normal. After doing some research on the web I found out that this is a new control Citrix put in the new Receiver install BUT it doesn’t do anything, yet. I also found this post of someone else having the same issue.
Now, I am unsure why it took two weeks after we rolled the client out to pop up, or why it picked only a certain group of users to harass. I also don’t understand why Citrix would add this in to their software if it does absolutely nothing. I am the type of person who loves to be on the edge of technology. I deal with Android issues all the time because I am running Cyanogenmod on my Nexus S 4G, but that is MY choice and I do so knowing the risks. I would not do the same with my users when problems like this not only ruin a good part of my long weekend, but also lowers productivity which turns into a loss of revenue.
I realize that bugs happen in all software, but this seems like a big miss. Why would anyone include something that serves absolutely no purpose (yet) in your “stable” software download?