In working on a new deployment of the Hot Desktop feature within Citrix Password Manager I discovered that there are a few problems with the latest Password Manager agents.

Ok so there are more than just a few problems…  Basically Hot Desktop doesn’t work with Password Manager Agents 4.6.265 and 4.6.266.

When using either one of these two agents you will find that Hot Desktop installs without incident but the process that executes the session.xml functions only appears to be triggered on the first logon after a reboot.  That’s a BIG problem because the whole idea behind Hot Desktop is the fast switching from one user account to another!  So if you have to reboot each time a user logs off just to prepare the system for the next user then you probably aren’t shaving very much time off of the logon process.

The good news is that Password Manager Agent 4.6.264 DOES work properly with Hot Desktop.  The bad news… it doesn’t support the new XenApp Platinum licensing model for desktop and offline usage.  As it turns out this isn’t that big of a problem because it’s not very likely that you would need the Hot Desktop functionality in a disconnected or offline mode.

I briefly spoke with Citrix support and they verbally acknowledged that in fact they were aware the functionality was missing or broken in the two latest agents.  I didn’t get a very clear sense of when or if a fix would be available but I did hear that a new release of Password Manager might be on the horizon.