3rd Party Excel Add-ins in Azure Virtual Desktop do not want to stay enabled.

Question

I am working in a non-persistent host pool with fslogix profile and office containers set up. There are a handful of 3rd party add-ins that get installed in Excel and Word when their applications get installed. The add-ins will not stay enabled for standard users. However, when disabling fslogix for those users and forcing them to use a local profile on the hosts, the add-ins work. The add-ins also work for admin accounts.

I have reached out to Microsoft Support and they have not been able to find a resolution. I still have a case open with them.

Has anyone run into this issue? If so, can you please share the resolution?

Also, if you have not run into this issue, do you recommend checking any settings that may be causing this issue? (group policy, fslogix configuration, etc)

Answer 1

Good day,

I encountered a similar issue with VSTO-based Excel add-ins such as OpenText ALM and SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office on non-persistent virtual machines using FSLogix.

The root cause was traced to the Redirections.xml configuration, which included the following exclusion:

AppData\Local\assembly

This exclusion prevented the necessary .NET assemblies from being persisted in the user's FSLogix profile container, causing the add-ins to function correctly during the initial login but become disabled on subsequent logins.

To resolve the issue, I removed the above exclusion from the Redirections.xml file. After doing so, all VSTO add-ins continued to work properly across user sessions.

If you're experiencing similar behavior, please check your FSLogix configuration and remove the AppData\Local\assembly path from exclusions.

Answer 2

@Saul Rodriguez

I would recommend to check the following and let me know your observations.

1. Please check the installation path of those add-ins and where in the registry they manifest themselves.
   You can compare the behavior for a local profile and an FSLOGIX profile to see if, for example, the registry path is incorrectly set.
2. Make sure you are using the latest FSLogix version.
3. Check also if a redirection.xml has been set up to exclude specific folders. The redirections.xml file is used to control what folders are redirected out of the profile container to the C: drive.
   If it exists, the file is located inside <ProfileRoot>\AppData\Local\FSLogix

Profile Container content - FSLogix | Microsoft Learn