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Last week Citrix released version 10.2 of their ICA Client. The first thing you’ll notice is the client is now a whooping 14.9 megabytes. An increase of 106% over the previous public release (v10.150, 7.2 megabytes) and an increase of 164% over the initial release (v10.0, 5.6 megabytes) a year ago. Looking through the readme file it does not appear that any new features were added, only bug fixes. So why so big? Several reasons: Of course program binaries and libraries are going to grow in size as new code is added to fix issues. This is a given, but a 106% increase?
Well, this time around Citrix included the Microsoft Foundation Classes Library v8.0. My guess is good as anyone’s, but I would say that Citrix either switched from static to dynamically linking to the MFC Library thus needed to redistribute the MFC 8.0 Library or the usage of the MFC 8.0 libraries are new all together.. Also, upon further investigation, I noticed the unpack size of the ica32pkg.msi is almost 700k larger than its predecessor (2730k vs 2,096k). A quick run through the installation process shows that the installation process is the same and a glance into the .msi with Orca doesn’t reveal anything significant has been added. This part is still mystery. A final observation shows that the ica32pkg.msi (as well as the ica32web.msi) doesn’t appear to optimally packaged. If I run through an administrative installation and repackage it is as single .msi the new size shrinks 11.3 megabytes (and down to 8 megabytes for ica32web.msi) | Client | Original Size | Recombined Size | | ica32pkg.msi | 15,246k
| 11,534k
| | ica32web.msi | 15,115k | 8,205k
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So how can you reduce the size of the client? Simply download the ica32pkg.msi (or ica32web.msi) packages and run it through the administrative install. To run through the administrative installation for the ica32pkg.msi simply drop to a Command Prompt and run the following commands: msiexec /a ica32pkg.msi Select a directory to place the recombined ica32pkg.msi and choose the Single Windows Installer File option from them. Run through the rest of installation wizard select the default options that you wish to use. Once completed, the new ica3pkg.msi will be located the directory you choose at the beginning of the wizard. The process of performing an administrative installation for the ica32web.msi is slightly different. You will need to first rename the ica32web.msi package to ica32pkg.msi. Once that is complete, run through the same procedures described above for customizing the ica32pkg.msi package. Once you have the rebuilt version of the ica32pkg.msi package simply rename it back to ica32web.msi. I know this all sounds silly, but for some unbeknownst reason Citrix hasn’t figured out to way to fix this yet. The whole process should be simple enough and worth the effort given that you’ll be able to shave almost 7 megabytes off the size of the client.
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