Microsoft Access 2013 on Server 2008 R2 SP 1 remote access through XenDesktop Screen Freeze

Solution

New Solution:

"Legacy Graphics Mode" is an option is Citrix Policy. Enabling this for the desktop group will stop Access from freezing, and doesn't break 'browse' 'save-as' etc. Unsure exactly what legacy graphics mode does, still trying to get someone to answer that for me, or why it doesn't work in the first place, but this is a less bad work around.

Appears to be some visual theme here that messes up the ICA connection. The "fix" - probably more of a workaround - is to run the program in compatibility mode (don't forget to set for all users). You'll want to select compatibility mode for windows 7 + disable visual themes.

Edit: People on Citrix forums claim that this effects office 2010 as well; I can't confirm that it does, or that this fix works for 2010 if the problem does exist, but there you go.

Warning: This workaround has been found to cause some other undesirable behavior. Notably: "browse" buttons will no longer launch the file browser to allow you to select files. This effects a number of things such as the "save as..." feature and "import from (excel/text/etc)" wizards. This is arguably less detrimental than the screen freeze but please be aware.

The Problem / Full story

As you may guess from the title, this is an insanely specific bug that we ran into in one of our labs. Students were trying to use MS Access (because we teach that for some reason) and their sessions kept on locking up. Here's the sequence of events:

Users log into Wyse Xenith 2 thin clients connecting to a 2008 R2 SP 1 terminal server type environment through XenDesktop (Citrix seems to refer to it as ServerOS connection, or Shared Published Desktops). This works great.

Users then open Access and everything seems to be working fine, but when they try to open a table in design view the screen freezes after a few seconds. At this point the machine is completely unresponsive, the mouse still moves, but no mouse clicks or keystrokes appear to have any effect.

I say "appear to have any effect" because they actually do the user just can't see them. If I use lanschool to remotely watch/control the user's session I can see them clicking around and typing things, and when I control I can interact with the session just fine; The user cannot see anything changing on the screen. It's totally bizarre. 

The only way I've found to restore functionality is to remotely log the user off so they could log in again. 

The really weird thing is that none of the factors individually cause the problem. Using Access on the same server but over remote desktop (RDP) works just fine. Using Access on a windows 7 machine over xendesktop works just fine. No other program I've used on the server over XenDesktop has exhibited this behavior.

I figured out the workaround above pretty much by trial and error. Then figured out the correct solution from citrix forums; Yay citrix forums!