JVH Consulting's Blog

I’ve been using Autotask Endpoint Management to monitor and manage my clients’ systems. Today I had a problem where my laptop was actually a part of another Autotask account and the change over to my account was pretty gnarly!

There should be a procedure for how to do such things but so far there isn’t.
Steps to take:
1. Remove account from instance of Autotask (one you’re leaving) delete the account and let it take it’s course in uninstalling on the client machine.
2. Should the second part not work, go to appwiz.cpl (short for Programs and Features) old Win95 reference to Add/remove programs. From there remove the Centrastage application.
3. Once all that is cleared up you should be able to install the new client agent from the new AEM Site.
Here’s where things went amiss.

I did all the above, not necessarily in the same order but got it done.
However upon step #3, the agent (system tray) would not start. Took a while to figure out that my AV/Firewall was blocking the application from starting.. Or another option is access to the c:\programdata\centrastage folder – but after checking Perms – they all seemed good and my account and System had Full Control.

Found a tidbit to run C:\Program Files (x86)\CentraStage\Gui.exe from a command prompt to let it run through it’s paces to get the Centrastage Tray working. With FW turned off and after running this the tray application could start.

However even with it running, I could not manage my client machines – the tool wouldn’t start the agent browser where you can then look at and open remote console tools…ugh
So decided to uninstall again and rip out all other parts of Centrastage application:
rmdir or just type: rd /S /Q “C:\Program Files (x86)\CentraStage”
rd /S /Q “C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CentraStage”
rmdir /S /Q “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\CentraStage”
rd /S /Q “C:\Users\%%f\AppData\Local\CentraStage”
rmdir /S /Q “%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\CentraStage”
reg delete “HKCR\cag” /f
reg delete “HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run” /v CentraStage /f

After, reinstalled everything and still not able to manage my client systems from the laptop.

Next decided to remove all the above again, and then remove all instances of Splashtop remote agents.
– Uninstalled Splashtop Streamer
– Uninstalled Splashtop Business Tool
Manually removed all splashtop folders found:
rd /q /s “C:\Program Files (x86)\Splashtop”
rd /q /s C:\programdata\splashtop
rd /q /s c:\%userprofile%\appdata\local\splashtop

Searched Registry for Splashtop items and removed things there as well (too many to list).

Did all that, and re-installed CentraStage application which in turn installed splashtop…
From there I was able to run the Agent Browser to connect to a device but when connecting to said machine using the splashtop plugin, Received a prompt asking which application to use to open the ST-Centrastage application… uh What? The only choice it gave you was to search the Microsoft Store… again What? What did I do to cause this behavior.

See picture:

The prompt states: You’ll need a new app to open this st-centrastage
with option to only look in the Store…

After much searching for st-centrastage and other… I was stumped and filed a ticket with Autotask folks.

Later in the day, decided to take a clean machine, join it to my AEM account and try to connect to a device using Splashtop. Before it could connect it prompted me stating it was missing the Splashtop Remote agent.. hmmm, said yes install it and then watched appwiz.cpl to see what application got installed – Sure enough MSP Remote Support by Splashtop was installed.
Went back to laptop and found the application was there but it couldn’t be uninstalled because I previously deleted all the Splashtop folders. Doh!

There are very few references on line for how to install this tool, there are plenty for uninstalling it but that doesn’t help when all the files are gone.

Ended up searching the registry for “MSP Remote” – started to delete all instances here as well so the connection program would later prompt me to re-install like on clean system above. As I ran through and found all the instances and deleted them, I came across one that showed the installer msi file used to install the application: LocalPackage – C:\windows\installer\43aee708.msi (different for every machine). So on laptop, went to that directory and ran the install. Rebooted and whoo hoo! success!

In a nutshell, to resolve transitioning from one AEM Instance to another
– Remove everything
– including the MSP application,
– then go back and remove the directories like above.
– then install the new AEM agent and attempt a remote connection (splashtop) if it fails with attached picture, search for the MSP Remote Support by Splashtop in registry to find the msi installer file to run and re-install this. without it you’ll go crazy looking for the solution. :).

Hope this helps.