Citrix Receiver for Mac "Cannot start the desktop ... OSStatus -1712"

Solution

In my case there were non-responsive processes on the mac client that were causing the problem. To resolve, I closed out of receiver and closed any active desktop connection. I then brought up the activity monitor (command+space to bring up the search, enter "activity monitor"). There were several Citrix processes, one non-responsive process with the name of the personal desktop that wouldn't load and a few helper processes. I force-quit all Citrix processes, then restarted the receiver client. Connected to desktop successfully at that point.

It may not have been necessary to force-quit all Citrix processes, but it doesn't seem to have had any consequences, they started back up when I reloaded receiver.

Problem / Full Story

Had a user this morning that couldn't connect to their windows desktop over XenDesktop (7.1). User is one of our few Mac (running Mavericks) users, and uses XenDesktop to get to windows applications he needs. When he tried to log in this morning, he got the following error when he tried to connect to his windows 7 machine.

Cannot start the desktop "Personal Desktop"

 Contact your help desk with this information: The application "Personal Desktop" could not be launched because a miscellaneous error occurred. (OSStatus -1712).

Odd thing was, he was able to connect to his Windows 8 desktop just fine. So the connection to the server was working, as was the connection to at least one VM. The Win7 machine was showing up as registered and ready in Citrix Studio on the XenDesktop Controller. Win7 appeared to be responsive when interacting with it through XenCenter. I tried restarting the Windows 7 machine but the error persisted. A brief look through the longs on the Win7 machine and the XDC didn't show any errors, so it seemed like the problem wasn't server-side. Had the user logout/close receiver on his machine and reopen it, but the error continued to occur.

Up in the user's office I brought up the activity monitor and saw the unresponsive process -- see "Solution" above. After killing and restarting all citrix processes the user was back up and running. Rebooting the Mac probably would've had a similar effect.