App-V: Clearing the cache...the hard way.

Ever cleared an application only to find it didn't delete everything? Clearing something from ProgramData is no big deal as this can be done fairly easily by anything running as the system account (SCCM for example). Clearing a users profile is another story.

If you have used a command prompt much at all then 'rmdir' is nothing new to you. What you may not realize is that rmdir isn't an executable, it's a command. So in this case calling "rmdir" in an SCCM package will net an unusable package. The workaround is thus:

%COMSPEC% /c rmdir /q /s "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\SoftGrid Client\<FolderName>"

Put this in SCCM, set it to run as user, and it should clear the folder just fine.

In this case, to clear an app I used something along the same lines as what I use to clear office.

sftmime.exe CLEAR APP:"<AppName>" /LOG "C:\InstallLogs\Clear.log"

Run %COMSPEC% package.

sftmime.exe DELETE PACKAGE:"{<PackageName}" /LOG "C:\InstallLogs\Delete.log"

sftmime.exe REFRESH SERVER:<ServerName> /LOG "C:\InstallLogs\Refresh.log"

Set the programs each to Start In: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Application Virtualization Client

Clear app can be done as admin or user, user gives the best chance of it clearing the folder you are trying to delete, but if the user doesn't have clear permissions this will fail (default permissions should be to allow a Clear if I recall).

Deleting the package is again a case of rights, most likely you will want to run this as admin so it deletes it globally and you are assured permissions to do so.

Refresh should be run as the user so the USER contacts the publishing server to retrieve their software.

In this case the reason for the refresh is because an application was updated and the update pulled down the new OSD but failed to pull down the updated SFT, which left it in a non-functional state. I still want the user to have the application and not need them to log off so I clear it, delete the folder, delete the app, then refresh the publishing server so they get their app back seamlessly.

Thanks to Justin for the tweak to make this work with SCCM.