Logging into Citrix XenDesktop with Profile Management 4.1 gets stuck at the “Welcome” screen

Problem

You have a new Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 desktop catalog deployed that uses Citrix Profile Management 4.1 to roam all of the user profile settings that your current Active Directory Redirected Folders doesn’t handle but noticed that after installing your applications and deploying the pool, users attempting to log in gets stuck indefinitely at the Welcome screen:

As a troubleshooting step, you’ve updated Profile Management from 4.1.0 to 4.1.2 (http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX134616) but still notice the same symptoms.

Solution

While I’m sure there are plenty of reasons out there that can cause this issue, the reason why the desktop pool I was working with exhibited this behavior was because we had ESET 5.0.2126.0 antivirus agent installed onto the Windows 7 desktop:

Rather than change the settings of the agent which I didn’t have permissions to, I went ahead to try turning off Profile Streaming in the Profile Management GPO as such:

Computer Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> Citrix –> Profile Management –> Streamed user profiles –> Profile Streaming

 

… which ended up fixing the issue.  I won’t go into the details of what you lose by not configuring this policy but will paste the description for it here:

With profile streaming, users' profiles are synchronized on the local computer only when they are needed. Registry entries are cached immediately, but files and folders are only cached when accessed by users.