After upgrading from VDA 1912 CU6 to VDA 2203 CU5, users may notice that when launching published applications, the launch seems to proceed fine and the application shows up on the Task bar. However the users are not able to see the application even when clicking on the task bar icon.

The folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\System32 should not exist in the newer version of VDAs. In some circumstances, this folder may not get cleaned up by the VDA upgrade process (like if a 3rd party application like Antivirus has an open handle on the files) and this results in the launch issue. If it is a non-persistent machine catalog, make the changes to the Master image and then update the catalog and test. This problem can happen when upgrading from one of the older versions of the VDA (typically 1912 OR earlier VDAs) to a newer version.

Take a backup of the contents of C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\System32 folder, delete the contents and reboot the server. This should resolve the problem.

When launching published applications, they do not launch as expected even though they show up in the Task bar on the client side.