Active Sessions data not updated in the View Admin UI

I worked on this issue on a View 4.0 setup, where the Admin UI was not correctly showing the number of Active Sessions. There were multiple users who were logged in to the VMs on this pool, but the number of Active Sessions were shown as zero and all the VMs were in Ready Status in the View Admin UI, which was incorrect.

The session status of the VM is communicated by the process WSSM.EXE that is running on each of the individual VMs. You can check if this process is running by checking the Task Manager. Ideally, this process would be started on a user logon and is controlled by the below registry key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Userinit

The value of this key would be something like this.
"C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe","C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Agent\bin\wssm.exe"

On this computer, the value for this key was pointing to a third party program and there was another key created with the name "UserinitReplaced" and the path for the WSSM.EXE was also missing.
Apparently this third party application had been installed after the View agent was installed. Uninstalling the View agent and reinstalling it, put the missing path under the key "UserinitReplaced" and this resolved the issue.
If doing a recompose after updating the parent VM is not an option, you can push a group policy to update the appropriate registry key ("Userinit" or "UserinitReplaced" ) to include the path for the WSSM.EXE process.

Note: Making any mistakes here might lead to issues like MyDocuments window opening continuously.
http://www.kace.com/support/kb/index.php?action=artikel&cat=2&id=662&artlang=en

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View VMs not able to connect to the domain

Here is a peculiar issue that I ran into.
Randomly users would not be able to log on to their View virtual machines, with the machines throwing the below error.

"Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found.  Please try again later. If this message continues to appear, contact your system administrator for assistance."

This issue was seen on a non-persistent pool on a View 4.0 pool and Windows XP machines.

To resolve this issue, I had to do two things.

1. The original parent VM was not joined to the domain and only the linked clone VMs were joined to the domain. According to the View Administrator Guide it is a requirement for the parent VM to be part of a domain before pools are deployed from it.

2. I referred the below KB - http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006341

 - Start Registry Editor. To do so, click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
 - Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters
 - In the right pane, click the DisablePasswordChange entry.
 - On the Edit menu, click Modify.
 - In the Value data box, type a value of 1, and then click OK.
 - Quit Registry Editor.

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