Friday, January 29, 2016

Bizarre behavior when running programs as a domain user when logged in as local user

Yesterday I tracked down a crash that occurred in a third-party application when that program was run as a domain user but the Windows logon session was of a local user. The interesting thing was that the crash didn't happen on all computers.

After much investigation, I discovered that logging on to Windows with the domain user made the program (running in the local user's session) to start working again. I concluded that the program looked for some files in the profile of the user it was running as. I also guessed that the domain user hadn't logged on to the machine. Once it did, the full profile was established, so the program didn't crash when it looked for that file.

No comments:

Post a Comment