All of my Terminal Server users are experiencing a problem where the Explorer.exe simply stops. The task bar, start button, and desktop icons all vanish, leaving just whatever applications are open. There is no lag or general unresponsiveness, the process just dies. This problem happens during connected and disconnected sessions. I myself was lucky enough to observe it as it happened, and note the time and date for tracing purposes.
We are on Windows Server 2008 r2, in a virtualized environment (VMWare ESXI 5.5).
I have worked around it by logging the user off, or by instructing them to click CTRL + SHIFT + ESC to launch task manager, then using task manager to start a new Explorer.exe process. But the frequency of this problem is increasingly becoming overwhelming and draining resources and productivity.
Myself and the other engineers have scoured event logs but found nothing that we can trace to this behavior. I can't find a discreet event in the logs related to explorer.exe stopping.
Recently we've made these changes to the server:
- installed a different backup agent
- added to the membership of the local admin group because one of our applications stopped running unless the user was a local admin
- mass deleted files in the location %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.MSO because we needed to create space in the system volume
Does anyone have thoughts on an event or log file to look for? Anyone experience similar and resolve the problem? We already have some workarounds, but I am in real need of a solution. Thanks in advance to anyone that read this far and to anyone that can help.