Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP Layer Definition File

The Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP Layer Definition File (LDF) provides a mechanism for customers of Symantec Workspace Virtualization to create the Virtual Application Layer and package without the need to capture the installation.

Prerequisites

- Symantec Workspace Virtualization v6.1 SP1 or greater
- Symantec Workspace Virtualization Layer Definition Tool. Download.

Installation

The steps for creating the IE6 for Windows XP are very straight-forward.

1. Extract the download that accompanies this article to your desktop (ie6-winxp-x.x.x.x.zip - where -x.x.x.x is the LDF version).
2. Double-Click the .EXE file ( ie6-winxp-x.x.x.x.EXE ). This will invoke swvldf.exe (Layer Definition Tool) with the proper parameters to create the IE6 on Windows XP layer.
 

 Known issues:

• Performance issues detected.

Supported Side-By-Side Configurations

Internet Explorer 6 Virtualized will function "Side-By-Side" with any one of the following versions of IE installed to the base (i.e. installed natively and not virtualized).

Note: Internet Explorer 8 includes an IE 7 compatibility mode that provides IE7 compatibility. See the Microsoft Knowledge Base article for more information.

Support

Information about the support status of the IE6 layer created by this tool can be found here .
Please note that the IE6 layer created by this tool is only supported if the LDF and the Virtual Application Layer are not altered in any way.

Documentation

Documentation on the SWV Layer Definition Tool can be found here .

How it works

The swvldf.exe tool is passed an Layer Definition File (LDF) that contains XML tags that define all the data required to create a Virtual Application Layer. The files required for the Virtual Application Layer are downloaded from public sites on the internet and may require considerable time to complete depending on the file requirements. It is also possible alter the LDF to point to existing files that you already have available on your system. Please see the documentation to learn how to change the <file-source> tags to point to local file repositories. By default the <file-source> tags that download files using http do not use a proxy server. In order to use a proxy server please see the documentation for the "conn-str" attribute of the <file-source> tag.

Notes

The ie6-winxp.ldf requires that the following three files are available before the IE6 virtual layer can be created.
- WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe
- WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe
- WindowsXP-KB976325-x86-ENU.exe

These files are quite large and can take a long time to download over a slow network connection. The process of creating the IE6 virtual layer can be sped up considerably if these files are already available in your environment. SWVLDF can be instructed to skip downloading these files by doing the following:

- Create a directory named "downloads" in the same folder as ie6-winxp.ldf resides.
- Copy the required files to the "downloads" directory you just created.

If required files already exist in the "downloads" directory, SWVLDF will skip the download step. If SWVLDF fails to download a file, this process can be used to download the file "manually" using a download manager or other mechanism.