SP1 CU5 issues - Application, Package and Task Sequence

[cgman15]

Hi all

 

Got an issue recently that is quite strange that, after much hair pulling, has got me stumped.

 

Recently upgraded backend to 2012 SP1 CU5 and pushed out client update. All the clients that had the issues mentioned below had their clients upgraded fine according to log file, exit code 0.

 

We are now rolling out Office 2013 to users and having issues with some clients having the Task Sequence freeze at the Office install step (which is using an applicaition install step). We are using a task sequence to update other office plugins etc and carry out other steps all in one go. Testing never highlighted any issues.

 

The office install is actually finishing fine, the setup log file finished with either exit code 0 or 3010 (if it needs a reboot afterward successful install), the appenforce.log picks this return code and is happy that the install has finished but the smsappinstall.exe doesn't close and the Task Sequence just sits there doing nothing indefinitely. The smsts.log doesn't have any updates after the install starts either.

 

I have tried creating a package for Office 2013 instead and replacing the app install step with a package install step. I then had some issues of the SMS Agent Host Service stopping halfway through the install! Looking through event viewer there were crash reports for ccmexec.exe, pointing to tscore.dll being the offender.... Sigh.

 

Finally I tried a straight command line install, pointing to the install source files which seems to work without issue but has the drawbacks of not coming from a DP, and if the user loses network connection during the install I expect it to fail badly as it is directly accessing the files rather than caching them locally.

 

I have tried repairing the client by using ccmrepair.exe and that did seem to fix the issue on 3 devices we tried it on, then the 4th still froze even after client repair!

 

Any help/suggestions would be very welcome, I can usually fix the issue myself or find someone else who has had a similar issue online but there doesn't seem to be anyone else who's had an issue quite like this before....

 

Thanks all!

 

 

[trousers]

Wow, this is exactly the same problem I've troubleshooting the past few weeks.

 

In my case its a TS that installs IE11, Office 2013, and another non-Microsoft application.

 

About a month ago I built the TS and tested extensively. It worked without issue and I put it on the back burner until our proposed "go live."

A few days before the go live a few departments wanted to do the installs early. Easy enough, I just had them launch it through Software Center.

All 5 machines seemingly hung on the Office portion of the TS. Nothing in error logs. Windows Event viewer showed a successful install and all files/folders were there.

I rebooted the machines and re-ran the TS and they finished up fine.

 

Figuring it was something broken (even though it worked just fine previously) with the Office install I disabled that step.

Well, now the TS was hanging on the IE11 install. Same symptoms.

 

Disabling that step and the TS hung on the next install, etc, etc.

 

During troubleshooting it became seemingly random. Sometimes it would fail on Office, sometimes IE, sometimes the other app.

And sometimes it would complete just fine.

 

I know sometimes ccm can be sensitive to unexpected reboots, but I have reboots suppressed on the 3 installers. However in the Event logs Restart Manager pops just before ccmexec.exe crashes with tscore.dll.

 

I then went down the road of maybe Windows Updates were pending, or maybe IE/Office were triggering a Windows Update.

Moving the order of the installs around did not stabilize the TS.

 

This happens on both freshly imaged workstations as well as workstations that were imaged months ago.

And the TS didn't start to fail until about 3 weeks ago. It makes me wonder if a Windows Update somehow broke ccmexec.exe.

 

Have you had any further success in figuring this out?