Right. Here at work we use SCCM for deploying patches and virtual apps, and App-V for the actual running of virtual apps. The last couple of days we've had reports of people (particularly on laptops) experiencing MASSIVE slowdowns and high CPU usage for "System" and "sftlist.exe" in Task Manager. I think I've narrowed it down to the Trusteer Rapport software as on two of the affected machines now I've removed Rapport and everything has gone back to normal, and other affected people are telling me that they do have Rapport installed but their machines are too slow to remove it.

However, I hate Rapport in general as I've had many instances of it causing this problem over the past few years, so I just wondered if anyone else on here uses a similar setup and may have experienced the same thing. Just want to make sure I'm not piling blame on it just because I don't like it.

I have no problem with removing it from every corporate computer and if people don't want to do their Internet banking without it then tough, it's a University computer which I'm responsible for the running of. But before I go that far I'd rather confirm that it's definitely Rapport at fault as I can't find any release notes/changelogs suggesting what may have changed as of Monday afternoon to start causing this.

Cheers!

edit - for the record, I've just had a call from someone at the University of Nottingham about this after finding this post. Rapport is definitely the problem, I have a case open with Trusteer who are going to look over an affected machine remotely with me. As far as current fixes go, either removing Rapport or upgrading your App-V clients to App-V 4.6 (or presumably the new 4.6SP1) make the problem go away. The latter may not be an option for your institution (as it isn't for ours) so I'm hoping to work out a solution on the Trusteer side.

Edited 12 August, 201114 yr by gavinchappell

Wow. I just went through the registration process so I could ask you if you've had any recurrences because we've had the problem since last week. And then your update came through. Thank you for this post and for the update.Quick question, why would upgrading the client/s to 4.6 not be an option for you?

Regards

Well, it would be, apart from the number of clients we've got and the fact that the old XP corporate service is ending next year.

Long story short - we have one set of corporate computers on Windows XP with App-V 4.5 which are affected, and our new Windows 7 computers which have App-V 4.6 and are fine. So our IT department don't want to spend too much time planning and implementing a mass rollout of the new version of App-V which (in our environment) could conceivably take as long as the Windows 7 rollout anyway. The central IT department deal with several thousand managed PCs, both on and off the Uni campus (both desktops and laptops) so the planning and paperwork to do something like that here is huge.

For what it's worth, I have an appointment next Tuesday afternoon for Trusteer to remotely control one of the affected PCs and work out the problem. If you PM me a contact email address then I'll happily let you know what (if anything) comes out of it

Edited 12 August, 201114 yr by gavinchappell

A handful of people have stumbled on this page via Google (I've had a couple of surprise emails and phonecalls!) so for the record here's where we're up to. Trusteer don't want to fix the problem anymore, and have cancelled my previous appointment for a web conference for them to check out an affected machine. I've put copies of the email correspondence on my under-used blog so anyone who wants to see the gist of what's been said can find it here: http://bit.ly/pf1aFu

I am curious as to how you linked Rapport and AppV to discover this issue. We have been dealing with it since last week. We reimaged two PC's and replaced two. I brought the two that were replaced back to my office to continue looking at the problem. I ahve been lookin at Event logs all day today. I saw your post today and removed Rapport from one of the PC's. AppV now works and the CPU utilization is back to normal.

I'd love to confess to being some kind of genius, but it was a combination of gut feeling and luck. Had a look at one of the affected computers in safe mode, saw Rapport, I'm not a fan of it personally for many many reasons so I renamed the files/folders out of the way and bam, job done. Checked on a couple to make sure it was reproducible and there's my answer. I still haven't found a long-term, automated solution, a lot of the computers we've had won't allow the users to remove Rapport as they're loading too slowly to load the Windows Installer service which is required. Means Safe Mode is needed which is where it turns into a bit of a pain as we don't hand out Administrator passwords.

Rapport has caused all kinds of strange problems on a few machines where I work. The online banking we use keeps suggesting we reinstall it but I have told the relevant staff to ignore it.

Edited 22 August, 201114 yr by trundlenut

Yep, we're in the same boat. Trusteer did the web conference after all (after cancelling it once) and have now located the problem but couldn't offer a fix yet, just said to remove it and not reinstall it as there's nothing they can offer and thankfully weren't arrogant enough to suggest that we remove App-V. It doesn't really do that much that's critical to our organisation but it's possible that business critical apps could be deployed with it, so if people went removing it willy-nilly on Trusteer's advice then in some companies it could have pretty serious business impact.