Full shell (explorer.exe) running for a RemoteApp on Terminal server - vba

Question

Folks,
I'll been fighting this for a few weeks now. We have a proprietary corporate app running on thin clients in our organization. From this app we can apply VBA scripting behind the scenes to do simple functions. In the past adding buttons to open IE and direct them to certain web sites to enter data, open Calc and etc.
Recently I have been working the code below. It was developed on the Server using a RDP session which launches the full desktop and explorer.exe. What I have noticed that if explorer.exe isn't running then the code bombs at line in the function that reads "For Each oWin In oShApp.Windows " with "Run-time error '429'".
However if I script to start explorer.exe (which is bad because it enables the Start-bar and Task-bar) on the ThinClient which launches the desktop and full capabilities and it runs just fine as the Thin Client users that are logged in.
I have read a little bit about the "Limited Shell" that runs when using a remoteapp and not the full desktop and was wondering if there was anyway around it, without enable the start-menu and taskbar?
See the code below.
Thanks for the help, CreteIT
Private Sub cmdHomePage_Click()
Dim ie As Object
Dim sMatch As String
sMatch = "http://www.companyweb.com"
On Error Resume Next
Set ie = GetIEatURL(sMatch & "*")
On Error GoTo 0
If Not ie Is Nothing Then
ShowWindow ie.hwnd, 9
BringWindowToTop ie.hwnd
Else
Dim strHome
Dim strAPP
strHome = "c:\progra~1\intern~1\iexplore.exe www.companyweb.com"
strAPP = Shell(strHome, vbNormalFocus)
End If
End Sub
Function GetIEatURL(sMatch As String) As Object
Dim ie As Object, oShApp As Object, oWin As Object
Set oShApp = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
For Each oWin In oShApp.Windows
If TypeName(oWin.Document) = "HTMLDocument" Then
Set ie = oWin
If LCase(ie.LocationURL) Like LCase(sMatch) Then
Set GetIEatURL = ie
Exit For
End If
End If
Next
Set oShApp = Nothing
Set oWin = Nothing
End Function

Answer 1

I work on the RemoteApp team at Microsoft. I'm not quite clear whether you're running this script from an actual RemoteApp session or your own setup that has a different shell that replaces explorer.exe (or perhaps no shell at all), but either way the answer is about the same.
The Shell.Application ActiveX object your script is trying to instantiate appears to be implemented by the shell - typically explorer.exe. If that isn't running, the COM runtime won't be able to create an instance of the object, and when you try to activate it you'll get an error.
The obvious solution is to run explorer.exe but, as you observed, that also includes the taskbar and start menu, which you might not want. RemoteApp runs its own shell replacement (rdpshell.exe), but that doesn't implement Shell.Application, so just running your application under RemoteApp won't fix the problem.
There are a few potential solutions I can think of:
If you're not using RemoteApp, you could write your own replacement shell that does implement Shell.Application. This is quite a lot of work and there might not be a lot of documentation around on how to do it properly. If you already have a replacement shell, you might be able to extend it to implement Shell.Application.
You could use a different method to enumerate windows. Unfortunately this probably means Win32 (via the EnumWindows function), which isn't directly accessible from VB scripts; you might have to create an ActiveX object that implements the behavior you want, and invoke it from the script.
Similar to option 2 but more heavyweight - you could make that ActiveX object implement the whole Shell.Application interface - even though it isn't actually the shell - and register it on the remote machine. I can't guarantee you won't run into problems if you do this though; it isn't something I've tried before.
None of these solutions are ideal, unfortunately, but hopefully something lets you do what you need to.