Friday, June 5, 2015

Windows: Multiple users, one user gets a blue flash while attempting to launch applications while the other user works fine

I came across an interesting issue where if more then one user is on a Win 2012 r2 server there would be a blue flash while one of the users attempted to launch an application. While the other user would work just fine launching applications. If the user that was working fine logged off the user that was previously not working then would be able to launch applications.

In the event log i saw something similar to this:


Faulting application name: explorer.exe, version: 6.3.9600.17667, time stamp: 0x54c6f7c2
Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000000000
Faulting process id: 0xdd4

Faulting application path: C:\Windows\explorer.exe
Faulting module path: unknown

Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Well it turns out Winzip 19+ was installed on the server and seems to have been the root cause of the issue. I found the fix to be disabling Explorer File Association Helper in Winzip Options