PSADT script crashing, no errors

The Toolkit General Discussion
1

This is a tricky one and doubtful that anyone will have the answer, however I am running out of ideas and not sure what to do next.

The situation: Many computers will not be able to install any apps that used the PSADT to build them.
The script will “crash” without any error message- it will just blip and it’s gone, and eventually SCCM will return error 3221225477 - the program has terminated abnormally or crashed. If I check the PSADT log of an affected system, it will always be in the same place:

[Initialization] :: OS Type is [Workstation]
[Initialization] :: Current Culture is [en-US] and UI language is [EN]
[Initialization] :: Hardware Platform is [Physical]
[Initialization] :: PowerShell Host is [ConsoleHost] with version [5.1.18362.1714]
[Initialization] :: PowerShell Version is [5.1.18362.1714 x64]
[Initialization] :: PowerShell CLR (.NET) version is [4.0.30319.42000]
[Initialization] :: *****************************************************************************

That’s it.
We have found no common factors in the affected devices other than OS, everything is on W10 1909. They are different hardware types, some apps are the same but a lot are different. It’s never the same app either, and once this starts happening to a device, NONE of the apps built with PSADT will work and they all crash the same way. Running the script manually produces the same result. I have used PSADT 3.6.8 up to 3.8.4 with the same results. We can re-image the device and they will work for a while but eventually the issue comes back. I have not found a way to re-create the issue.

It is a very small percentage of devices, out of 30k endpoints we have maybe 2 dozen reports of this happening. But as we all know, if the wrong PC goes down at the wrong time, the whole world blows up. I also have a lot of eyes on me since I primarily use the PSADT for almost every app I do, and I have probably 300 in our enterprise now including many of our main EMR applications.

We have had a call out to MS, they are going over trace logs but nothing has come of it yet. We have tried all the “normal” stuff, reinstalling all .NET’s, repairing WMI, etc… Checked RAM and HD of devices, etc… and coming up with nothing.

If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear it! Thanks-

2

When it occurs, it always bombs out or is it sporadic for those machines?

Have you tried running an installation payload manually on a system? Does it work or still bomb if running manually?
Have you tried running the .ps1 directly versus leveraging the .exe? What are the results when doing that, if so?

What is your antivirus solution? Try disabling it temporarily to see if it’s interfering?

3

Thanks for the replies.

Tried all of those suggestions. Running manually via the ps1, even if it is a different app created with PSADT will also display the exact same behavior. Attempted to install with AV disabled and has the same result. The MS guy thinks that .NET is what is crashing, we have run sxtrace logs and sent them to MS for analysis but they have not given us anything yet.

For some mission-critical apps, we have had to re-write them in shudder Auto-IT.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

4

Launch Powershell.exe ELEVATED then launch the PS1.
The Powershell console should stay up after the error occurs and display a message.

Keep SCCM out of this for now.