Citrix Receiver 4.x Store configuration through Group Policy fails

In one of our last deployments we tried to configure the necessary Citrix Receiver Store Configuration on our VDAs through a Group Policy. Unfortunately it was not working. The GPO was applied – but no store was configured.

The interesting part of the problem was that on other clients the same GPO was working – the user logged on and the store was configured – like it should be. We first started to remove the Citrix, run the Receiver Cleanup Utility and reinstall the Receiver. But it was still the same problem – the store was not configured automatically.

After checking the differences between the clients we found a difference in the registry. On the working client the following registry (with the Store information) was available:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Citrix\Receiver

This key was missing on the other client:

We exported the key from the working client and imported it on the not working client. If now a user logged on the Store was automatically configured – like it should be.

The question now was: Why is this key missing? Time to delete the key again and run a gpupdate /force to make sure all Group Policies are applied correctly. Check the registry again and – wohoo – the key is available. So everything looked fine – until we rebooted the VDA – the key was lost again. 
Interestingly other Receiver Configurations (like disabling SelfServiceMode) through the same GPO were applied correctly.

Though it was time to check what happens during the boot with procmon. Inside the procmon log we found some interesting results – the registry key was first created from the Microsoft GPO service and then deleted by the Citrix Group Policy engine.

Time to open a support ticket at Citrix. After some discussions and more testing we found the reason for the problem:
The Delivery Controllers had been configured through a GPO. This means that the VDA can only connect to the site after this GPO was applied. If the Citrix Group Policy engine starts and the VDA is not already connected to a Site every Citrix Policy is deleted. One of the deleted settings was the Receiver Store configuration (although that should be independent from other Citrix Policies). Interestingly other Receiver specific settings were not deleted.

Citrix developed a fix for this problem though that the Receiver Store configuration is not any longer deleted. Hopefully it will be integrated in the next Group Policy Client Side Extensions hotfix. If you have the same problem open a support case and ask for fix LC11637.