Access Connections 5 and up issues

Question

Hi,
For years our organization has been using Access Connections 4.52 flawlessly.  Recently we purchased a boat load of R500 notebooks.  At this point, we were forced to upgrade to version 5.20 as 4.52 will not recognize the wireless card.
With 4.52, when a client would boot up wireless and attempt to login to our network , Access Connections would pop up, then attempt the login only AFTER it has connected to the network.  With 5.20, 5.33 and 5.50, this function seems to work ok until I sysprep the image.
After I sysprep our image, this is what happens:  User boots up wireless and attempts to login to our network....gets and error stating "OURDOMAIN is not available"....15 seconds later Access Connections wakes up and connects to the wireless network.  Now, here is the really dumb part.  I can resolve the issue on my image by opening Access Connections > Location Profiles > Select Profile > Edit > OK.   Access Connections will now behave properly, until I sysprep.
Is there any solution out there for this?  Or even better, is there a way I can make 4.52 work on a newer model.  4.52 did not have this issue.
Thanks
Rosy

Answer 1

Hi,
I cannot see it being fair, to blaim Access Connection for situation, that is clearly not caused by Access Connection.
In the past I was working with multiple corporate images, which I of course had to create, which included syspreping the image. And I can tell you, that sysprepping a 100% working image is always, and I really mean ALLWAYS screwing up some part of the image. If you have been doing images for longer time, then surelly you will be agreed with me.
If you are not, then you have not created enough images manually (I mean starting with the times of RIS, going through WDS, IUB, SCCM .... ).
So much for understanding, where to look when you are looking for the root cause.
So Access Connection is a tool, that depends on other applications and driver. Almost the same as by all other TVT applicaitons. For Access Connection it's highly important, that it's installed in following order together with other tools/drivers:
1) Power Managerment driver
2) Power Manager
3) System Interface driver
4) Hotkey utility/driver
5) LAN Driver
6) WLAN driver
7) WWAN driver
8) Access Connection
It's highly important, that this order is kept.
So back to the imaging, here is what might happen, when you sysprep the image:
- you sysprep it, where some parts (usually ini files) are remoted from the dirver installed on the machine.
- of course you configure the sysprep to load up all the drivers depending on the HW, or some input from the client
- this will load everything back and inclusiv all the drivers
ISSUE:
- WLAN, driver is installed/inicialized after Access Conenction was present in the image
- by syspreping some of the above menitoned applications from Lenovo are taken as drivers and therefore, they are re-installed only after sysprep kicks-in
I'm pretty sure, that you know, how you install you image and by some points you might not be agreed with what I'm writing, but I was working with the informations, that I could find in your description.
I think more description on the sysprep, or the imaging tool and structure might help me imagine, what is goin on.
BTW: I just remembered, that by olders versions of AC 2.x and 3.x when such issue was present, like also LAN was not detected and all this happened after I installed a corporate image, then my fix for the image was quite simple:
Reinstall all the above drivers + apps in the order as you can see it in here .
Cheers