This issue absolutely did my head in. I had to publish it for you all to save you the time if you ever come across it as I was close to QUITTING because I couldn’t get this to work.
Scenario:
- Windows 2008 R2, Citrix XenApp 6.5 and Microsoft AppV 5 SP2.
- Applications published globally to the XA Servers
- All Servers streamed from Citrix PVS 7.1
- User profiles managed with Citrix User Profile Manager
This article for the Citrix UPM was already followed and the AppV Exclusions were definitely set
https://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/user-profile-manager-5-x/upm-using-with-app-v.html
Some App-V packaged applications would launch once, then never again when the Package Installation Root was pointing to the Read Only PVS Image (%programdata%AppV) and ONLY when the server was in Read only mode. If I was editing the image in PVS maintenance mode to update the vDisk – the issue never presented itself.
Ideally I wanted the App-V cache to point to the ‘out of the box’ %programdata%AppV – and in conjunction with PVS you can guarantee its fresh everytime
A temporary work around was to move the Package Installation Root to the D: (Read Write Disk) < but we soon started getting errors with this as no amount of scripting and startup scripts would cleanly remove this directory 100% all the time. I.E:
Get-AppvClientPackage -All | Remove-AppVClientPackage
remove-item -Recurse -Force d:app-v
get-appvpublishingserver | sync-appvpublishingserver -Global
This script would only remove the currently published applications, too bad for any legacy packages that were no longer published to the servers,

and for whatever reason the SYSTEM account was unable to delete the d:app-v folder (access denied even though it was owner and had full rights) sporadically the folder wouldn’t update at all and no applications would be refreshed until a user logged into the server. (Poinless on a citrix server where the applications have to exist if delivered as published apps’ Citrix could not find / see the executable and the published app would not run.
Eventually App-V Clients services started failing unable to start.

The Microsoft App-V Client service terminated with service-specific error The system cannot find the path specified.. EventID 7024 (Update: After further troubleshooting it turn out this was because some of the legacy packages were referenced in the Windows registry)
There had to be a better solution.
Solution:
Change the PVS 7.1 Disk Cache mode to “RAM with Overflow to Disk”, Return the Package Install Root to %programdata%AppV and generalise the AppV 5 Client before shutting down the image after each PVS update.

AppV 5 Generalise:
c:admintoolspstoolspsexec.exe -s powershell.exe “Get-AppvClientPackage -All | Remove-AppVClientPackage”
regedit.exe /s “C:adminToolsAppV_Generalise.reg”
AppvGeneralise.reg Contents:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftAppVClientIntegrationPackages]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftAppVClientPackageGroups]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftAppVClientPackages]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftAppVClientStreamingPackages]
Articles / References:
http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/348198-app-v-5-client-citrix-provisioning/ – Explains the situation clearly, and finally provided me the solution to fix it once and for all. Much thanks to Carl Fallis!