(Even Less) Painless Outlook/Office Reset With SVS 2.x

Resetting an SVS layer to recover from an application problem is a quick path to resolving a help desk ticket. Although there may be user settings in the registry lost when the app gets reverted to its standard baseline, that's a whole lot less disruptive to the end user than troubleshooting for hours or days and perhaps ultimately uninstalling and re-installing the app, which will likely lose your user settings anyway.

Regardless, SVS customers want the "holy grail" of a completely non-disruptive "fixit" sort of function that reliably corrects any app malfunction w/o the end user having to do anything at all to set the app back up with their configuration and customizations. Microsoft Office (esp. Outlook) is the ultimate use case here, as it has jillions of user-configurable settings found all over the place in the UI (and all stored in the registry, so they can't be excluded by SVS), it's very frequently virtualized, and because users tend to rely on it for a significant chunk of their work. It also tends to break a lot... but I should be polite and leave that out, huh?

My Office 2003 had developed some quirks over the past month or so. I was reluctant to do a reset because it hadn't been reset in about eighteen months. There were a ton of settings tweaks that I knew would take me days (or longer) to remember, find the GUI for once again, and get back the way I wanted it. But most of those were in Outlook, and I remembered that Outlook keeps it's most important settings under the Windows Messaging Subsystem profile key in the registry. Figuring, "well, at least I'll get the most important stuff," I did the following:

1. Found the writable sublayer number for my Office 2003 layer in SVS Admin.
2. In Regedit, browsed to my Windows Messaging Subsystem registry hive in the redirect area for that writable sublayer, which is located under:
   

   HKLM\SOFTWARE\fslrdr\(writable sublayer number)\HU\(User GUID)\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
   
   

3. Exported the whole Windows Messaging Subsystem hive to a .reg file.
4. Reset my Office layer in SVS Admin and noted the new writable sublayer number.
5. Cracked the .reg file I created in step 3 in Notepad and Find-Replaced the old sublayer number with the new one.
6. Imported the edited .reg file.

I then cranked up Outlook, Word and Excel and guess what? Not only were my problems gone, but Outlook had retained everything -- not just my mail service configurations but all my view settings and other preferences. The only two things I had to set back manually were two non-Outlook-specific options (disable Word's "Allow starting in Reading layout" and disable grammar checking).

Wow. My Office reset was painless! And the problems were gone!

When we add registry excludes in SVS 3, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem may be on the list of things to exclude for a layer containing Outlook. But of course, Rollback will be an even better solution; then you can keep even this key virtualized but not wipe it out when fixing an app issue. In the mean time, some of you may find this information useful. I bet it wouldn't take much work with WiseScript to automate the backup-restore steps above, either as a stand-alone utility or by using the OnPreReset and OnPostReset events.

Excelsior!