When a user has multiple Citrix Metaframe seamless applications open they may experience a situation where the applications suddenly switch.  By this I mean a user may hit a button in their foreground application and suddenly another application is in the foreground and their desired applicaiton is in the background or minimized.  The user then must alt+tab to go back to their intended application.  This can be a pain for users performing repetitive tasks such as cut paste into a form.  When they hit a save button the switch may occur.

To create a repeatable test I opened Excel , Remedy , and my ePolicyOrchestrator.  Users seemed to complain most about Excel but I found that any application that has form based buttons will trigger this behavior.  My EPO console was easiest because it uses a series of wizards to perform tasks.  Randomly when i'd click NEXT or FINISH buttons in the wizard my application would switch to the Citrix application I worked on prior to this one.

This behavior did not occur in non-seamless sessions.

We believe that this is caused by two applications having the same action tied to the action of clicking the button.  The first app does whatever action your button performs and the second app simply comes to the foreground.

Resolution: There is a hotfix available for Metaframe XP FR3  Here are the links to the patches for both Windows 2000 and 2003.  The patch does require a reboot.

Windows 2000 Citrix Metaframe XP/FR3 CTX104040

Windows 2003 Citrix Metaframe XP/FR3 CTX103878

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