Installation von Horizon View Agent fails continuously with "The System must be rebooted before installation can continue"

This issue was a bit annoying. I faced this issue not in a customer environment, rather then on my second Lenovo laptop, an X250 with Windows 10 20H2. My intention was to use it headless in a docking station. So how should I access it? RDP? TeamViewer? Why not use the Horizon Direct Connection Plug-in?

The Horizon Direct Connection Plug-in is not a new feature and you can think of it as a View Agent without a Connection Server. You can access it using the View Client, but you don’t have to run the connection through a Connection Server. For pretty small environments or direct access a perfect fit!

Error message View Agent setup

In order to use the Horizon Direct Connection Plug-in, you have to install the View Agent. So I downloaded the latest View 2006 Agent (VMware-Horizon-Agent-x86\_64-8.0.0-16530789.exe) and started the setup.

It fails right at the beginning. Okay, I just installed Windows Updates, so I rebooted my laptop. But the setup fails again. Next reboot. And it fails, and fails, and fails.

There are some registry keys you can check of you get such an error. “PendingFileRenameOperations” is one of the common issues when you face this problem. I found a script, but there was no reboot pending.

I finally found it: RunOnce.

There was an entry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce. After deleting this entry, the setup went through.

Fun Fact: There is an MSI Property for this, when you want to Silently install the View Agent : SUPPRESS_RUNONCE_CHECK.