App-V 5: Why are all of these Different Language Shortcuts Displaying in my Start Menu?

If you have been using App-V 5 SP1 with RDS (Remote Desktop Services) or Citrix XenApp servers, you may have noticed that when you installed the App-V 5.0 Service Pack 1 RDS Client using the EXE installer (no extraction) - this creates shortcuts for all 24 language packs on the start menu for Windows Server 2008 R2 machines. This was indeed a mistake which has been corrected with the SP2 EXE installer.

However, you may have noticed the SP2 version of the EXE installer still installs all of the 24 language packs. You will not notice this in any shortcuts but it will be visible in the Programs Control Panel as well as the App-V client installation folder. This is by design as the RDS EXE installer installs all the language packs so as to be able to service users from multiple locales by default. If you only want to install a certain language pack, I would advise for you to extract the MSI for the client and subsequent language packs by using the /LAYOUT and /layoutdir switches to extract the MSI files out.

More information on these switches can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/jj713460.aspx

Then you can install the MSI separately and will also allow you to suppress reboots for silent deployments using the /norestart switch. Bear in mind the EXE installer also detects (and applies if not found) some (but not all) prerequisites. Remember these will have to be deployed in advance when installing the App-V Client using the MSI installer.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Corrected. Thanks for the heads-up!
• Anonymous
  January 22, 2014
  You held on to the Shift button too long in the first sentence. SP! should be SP1. Very good information none the less.