Today I encountered a click once app from a third party partner that would not run on an existing Windows 2016 server. It was being shifted off of a Windows 2008 R2 server that was headed to oblivion. The task on the new server would start but never complete.

The task, which was created by the third party program, basically did something like this

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C:\Progra~1\Intern~1\iexplorer.exe https://www.thirdpary.com/superapp/super.application?SCHEDULE=1

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On the old server, IE would actually pop-up and be visible if I was logged in, leading me to believe this was an interactive services issue. After a bit of head scratching, the solution turned out to be to call into click once directly via the “ClickOnce Application Deployment Support Library” and bypass Internet Explorer 11 completely like so :

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rundll32.exe dfshim.dll,ShOpenVerbApplication https://www.thirdpary.com/superapp/super.application?SCHEDULE=1

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References :
https://www.mking.net/blog/programmatically-launching-clickonce-applications