The newer versions (probably those past 10.5) of Symantec's pcAnywhere sometimes appear very fragile right after you close your very first connection(s) to the Host. The connection is sometimes fine for more than one occasion, but sooner than later, a connection attempt to the Host will fail due to its no longer running the pcAnywhere program.
The Host machine, upon close examination after this failure, no longer has the pcAnywhere service, "awhost32.exe", running under Windows XP. The only thing that you will usually find is the connection icon in the system tray area. This "squiggly icon" is shown when a pcAnywhere Host is connected to a Remote system; however, in this case, it is only a remnant left behind after pcAnywhere fails after closing a connection. pcAnywhere is absolutely dead. Placing your mouse pointer over the "squiggly icon" seems to remind Windows XP of this, and the "squiggly icon" immediately (and properly) disappearers.
The work around is to program Windows XP Scheduler to run your pcAnywhere Host file, "*.bhf", after a certain amount of inactivity time, say maybe 5 minutes, and then activate this Scheduled Task when you leave your Host system for the day. I inactivate the Task when I am at the Host in order to avoid an intrusion by the Task. Scheduler will display a warning message if the PCanywhere Host is already running when Scheduler tries to run it again, but no additional messages are ever displayed later.
The work around works due to the fact that the Task will run 5 minutes after the system is idle (no mouse or keyboard input) and activate your pcAnywhere Host unless it is already running. This will reactivate your Host 5 minutes after a closing connection kills off the pcAnywhere service. The warning message is only displayed once if the service is already running. I have, at least once, seen two "squiggly icons" after a re-connection. One icon is a "dead" icon left over from a failed service (this one disappears if the mouse cursor touches it), the other is due to the new, current, active connection.
The tech support at Symantec can only recommend that you do a clean or safe boot into your operating system and attempt to strip out any running software that might interfere with Symantec's PCanywhere. This is essentially impossible in a business environment where your internal Computer Services must do such work, and they are usually not interested in such exotic problems.
I do not provide tech support for this work around, nor will I guarantee that it works on any OS for the Host machine other that Windows XP Pro. I will try, however, to answer some questions you may have about this solution.
Keywords: Symantec pcAnywhere, connection problem, connects only once, squiggly icon left behind, work around, Host, version 10.0, version 10.5, version 11, version 11.5
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