Two registry changes to improve physical Horizon View Agent experience

Using physical clients as Horizon View agents is pretty common for me. My office pc, as well as my Lenovo X250 are often used by using the Horizon View Client and the Blast protocol. But as good as the performance is, there were a couple of things that bugged me.

On my office pc, I encountered pretty often a black screen, either on first connect, or on reconnect. The typical issue caused by misconfigured firewall policies, but this was completly out of scope in this case, because my collegues never had issues with black screens. The problem occured with different versions of View Agent.

I finally fixed it after I tried to connected per HTML5 client. I got an error, that the connection server was unable to connect to 172.28.208.1. Huh? I don’t know this address… I checked my office pc and found out that this IP was assigned to the Hyper-V virtual switch.

I fixed this by adding this registry change:

HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\IpPrefix = n.n.n.n/m (REG_SZ)

n.n.n.n/m is the subnet on which your View Agent should be connected by the Connection Server.

The second issue was that my client constantly failed to reboot. I clicked reboot, and the machine was gone. No TeamViewer, no RDP, no PING. Only a hard power-off helped to get it back to work.

I fixed this by adding another registry change:

HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks = 1 (REG_SZ)
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillAppTimeout = 2000 (REG_SZ)
HKU\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks = 1 (REG_SZ)

This fixed both issues, black screen and hung on reboot, for me.