I created a task that displays a message to the user and gives them 5 minutes to log off before the action forcefully executes. The task is configured to run independently of whether or not a user is logged in. However, we have found that some machines get stuck at the “Pending Message” status until someone else logs in and the message is actually displayed.
Looking at the log, we see that the user interface is not launched:
At 13:51:38 -0400 -
User interface process unable to launch (22.1245) for user ‘’. Retrying every 30 seconds.
However, there isn’t a user logged in to the machine, so the action never seems to run, even after the 5 minute deadline. I could understand the action not running if the message cannot be displayed to a user. However, it seems like the BES client thinks that a user is logged into the machine when they actually aren’t.
I did not contact BigFix support yet because I have been fairly busy with other things and, while this is a nuisance, it only happens occasionally.
I think that it may have something to do with logging into the machine through remote desktop prior to running actions. The BES client UI seems to have trouble dealing with that. If you find out what’s causing it in your case and don’t mind posting your solution here, I would appreciate it.
I think we figured this out… Sometimes there is a Windows login session that becomes “stranded” so that there is sort of a half-session logged in (you can see it in various tools that enumerate logged in sessions). There won’t be a username associated with this session (which is why our error message only shows user ‘’ instead of giving the name).
When our agent sees this half-session logged in, it tries to launch the ClientUI in this session, but it doesn’t work.
We are able to replicate this using various non-standard remote control tools, but we aren’t clear what other reasons might affect this.
The reports we have gotten so far have told us that this only occurs on a small number of server computers. We are working on a patch for our agent to make it smarter about detecting and handling these sessions.
Hope that helps… Our support team should have more info for you…
I am also having the same issue and I have come up with a work around. I do a pre-execution action script that logs off all of the Terminal Server sessions before the patching starts. I use a free utility to it called Tslogoff since the built in windows command Logoff requires you to specify the session ID you want to loggof. With Tslogoff I just say “tslogoff *” which will log off all TS sessions.
We had to implement a custom restart task using shutdown.exe with the below action which seems to help and will be tested further this month with patching. We do have a case open for Pending Message, but is there any ETA on an actual fix for this one?
//Action Begin
// Various shutdown (restart) options for OS’s based on the availability of shutdown.exe
// The BigFix restart command is also used and will run in all cases (e.g. shutdown.exe may run as well as BigFix restart.)
IF {(name of it = “Win2003” or name of it = “Win2008” OR (name of it = “WinVista” AND product type of it != nt workstation product type)) of Operating System}
IF {exists file “shutdown.exe” of system x64 folder}
//note using dos as opposed to run for issues where process can not be created against shutdown.exe and line could fail
dos cmd /c “{pathname of file “shutdown.exe” of system x64 folder}” /r /t 60 /d P:0:0
ENDIF
ELSEIF {(name of it = “Win2000”) of Operating System}
IF {Exists key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Reskit\NameSpace\Windows 2000 Resource Kit” whose (exists value “InstallDir” of it AND exists file (value “InstallDir” of it as string & “shutdown.exe”)) of Registry}
dos cmd /c “{value “InstallDir” of key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Reskit\NameSpace\Windows 2000 Resource Kit” of registry as string & “shutdown.exe”}” /r /t:60
ENDIF
ENDIF
// Above lines would have issued shutdown.exe from appropriate OS
// Below line will issue a BigFix restart command in all cases (as a 2nd measure to get OS’s to restart.)
Looking forward to that! We have struggled with this issue to day. Server “hangs” on Pending Message. When logging in, shutdown continues and the server reboots.