Issues opening Payroll 29.02 with a roaming profile created for a Windows server 2012 server

SOLVED

We are having a very strange issues on our Server 2022 RDS server (21H2 Build 20348.2031) where users that were created back when we were using our old 2012 RDS server are unable to open Payroll version 29.02. The SBDdesktop.exe application appears in task manager but we are not even given a splash screen. Version 29.01 works absolutely fine, and users created since moving the RDS server to 2022 can use 29.02 absolutely fine on the same server. We suspect this could be related for the dropping of support for Server 2012 and there is something hanging around in the registry settings for the users with profiles from the old server.

Recreating the users profile disk does seem to fix the issue but this isn't an ideal solution as this would mean a day of work configuring everyone's profiles again. We've managed to narrow it down to an issue in the CurrentUser section of the registry, as we took an export from a working user, and overwrote the registry for a non working user and 29.02 opened with no issues. We've gone through the registry for any reference to Sage Payroll, tried removing various keys and we are unable to find out what in the registry is causing the issue. 

Is anybody able to provide any information on what registry entries could be causing the problem? 

  • 0

    Hi Gianni,

    Thanks for using Community Hub.

    I believe you may have already raised this area with Sage Technical Support, and they've advised that it's outside of their remit as they can only advise on setup and installation / processing. Configuration would need to be looked at by local IT.

    However, I'll leave this thread open in case anyone in the community has experienced similar and can offer further advice.

    Regards,

    Andy
    Sage UKI

  • +1 in reply to Andy Rickeard
    verified answer

    Hi Andy,

    After a few hours of troubleshooting we've discovered the registry entries that are causing the issue. They are found here: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\ThemeManager

    They're called DllName and PrePolicy-DllName. I changed the file they were looking for to be Aero.msstyles rather than AeroLite.msstyles. This was deployed via GPO and now after updating to 29.02 the application opens with no issues.