I connect to my customer over the Internet, running APPX on their NT. It works okay, but once in a while my APPX session just dies on my laptop. I guess it is timing out, or something.

Write down the PID that appears on your APPX/Client screen before it dies. Next time you log on you could issue to the APPX/Server a RUN to the O/S that executes a 'kill' on that PID. (Note that your kill will only kill a process with that PID, that is also owned by you as the UID.)

The format is: kill

(The 'kill' command is not part of Windows 2000. A shareware replacement, 'pskill', can be downloaded from

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pskill.shtml)

If you go into Registration Usage at 3)SysAdmin, 1)Setup, 1)Registration, 2)View Registration Usage, you can see the PIDs of registrations in use.

If Registration Usage contains entries for which there is no corresponding entry in the Task Manager's Processes list, you may want to set environment variable APPX_LS_GHOSTS=1, in order to instruct APPX to purge the dead entries. And/or delete $APPXPATH/0SA/Data/USAGE.dat and USAGE.key at will.

(See also APPX Presentation Server & WinAppxD.)

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­We have a record in a file that is reporting "locked" if you try to change it. No one is on it that we are aware. Hints for what to do? The user, running APPX Client, was in the middle of updating this record when her session "crashed".

The APPX session is probably still running on the server, and that's what's holding the record.

You need to do one of the following:

- Have a look at the registration usage to see if there is an orphaned session for that user. If you can find it, KILL it from the NT console.

- Reboot the server (simple, but drastic)

- Use NTHandle on the server and find the PID that has the file. Then kill it. At the heart of it, NTHandle digs out the PIDs and the open files. You still have to parse through NTHandle, once you have it from www.sysinternals.com

- Ask everyone to log off, stop the WinAppxD and License servers, and kill any remaining APPX sessions on the server. If there are background jobs running, it might be tricky to identify the background jobs from the ghost task.

- Identify the process id's of all currently connected clients (look in the title bar if P/M client, or under the 'About' menu if Java) and kill everything but those. Again, watch out for background jobs, if you use them at your site. Also, you might want to stop the WinAppxD service while you do this to prevent new users from logging on while you try to find the ghost process.

- Download and install the BJutils package. This is Bruce Johnston's APPX utility package, and one of the utilities allows you to see who has what files open and also allows you to kill APPX sessions. This would help you identify which APPX session is holding the record. You can get this from www.cansyswest.com, under Free Stuff. You also need the NT Resource Kit to make these work.

(From ECRs #5174 and #5028.)