Virtually Jason

Every now and then I get a little too aggressive when cleaning up files in a ThinApp package and all of my file type icons disappear within that package. They’re fine in the OS, but viewed from the ThinApp itself, you get nothing but default Windows icons. Microsoft Office is notorious for this – the actual ThinApp executables all have good icons and files within Explorer all look good… but the Open Dialogue box has no working icons! It took me a bit of poking around to figure out what was happening, so I figured that I’d write it down here so that I can easily look it up in the future (and maybe someone else will benefit from this too!). The problem (with Office) comes from when you clean up files from %systemroot%\Installer. In my ThinApp Office 2010 Instructions you’ll notice that I do some work with Robocopy – that’s to work around this issue. Rather than just preserving the executables that Office uses (which was my goal there), I’ve decided to actually go into some detail...

When you install ThinApp, it includes several utilities that are very useful for manipulating and troubleshooting your ThinApp packages. One of them is vregtool, which I’m going to discuss today. Vregtool allows you to examine and manipulate the registry for a ThinApp. Why would you need this when you can simply embed Regedit inside your package and use a tool with which you’re already familiar? Well, vregtool can be used to examine .tvr files, like the registry change files that get stored in the sandbox. What this means is that you can start up a ThinApp, change some setting and then examine exactly what registry change was made to reflect that setting change. That can make it very easy to cherry pick the application settings that you want to embed within your package, vs. those that you want to leave out. Perhaps the concrete example of my use case will help this to make sense. A customer recently had me package Office 2007 for use in their VDI environment. Office 2007 i...