Smartcard not working on Windows CE 6 thin client (Citrix XenApp 5)

Begin this year a customer asked me to solve his problems with smartcards (UZI-pas) on Windows CE6-based thin clients. The problem was, in short, that after removing the smartcard it was unrecognized.

 

As a bonus, when a user was authenticated using a certificate on the smartcard, an eject and reinsert was simulated causing the problem to raise instantly. Since the customer has over 2000 thin clients, this is a major issue.

During some investigations I found out that the problem did not occur with the Win32 client, only with the CE6 client. So one solution could be to replace all thin client  with a Windows Embedded version since this is a Win32 platform. As you can imagine, no customer is happy to hear this as a “solution”.

I found an article which (pretty much) described the same problem : CTX112358 . So I created CDF traces and process monitor logs, called Citrix support and created a support call.

It took around 3,5 months to locate the problem and fix the problem, but today I received a private build that fixed the problem. Yeah!

Altough it is a shame it took longer than expected, I’m very happy Citrix solved the problem (on the “old” Windows CE platform)!

 

The resolution to the problem is twofold:

1) On the client side : A new ICA client is required (private build for now, a public build will be released soon, check the Citrix download site for a client released after 22 April 2011)

2) On the server side : scardhook.dll version 4.5.4400.1 is required. It can be found in the Hotfix Rollup Pack 6 for XenApp 5 – CTX122756.

 

Ingmar Verheij

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