I’m a fairly committed Yugma user for conferencing, screensharing and remote desktop control (it works really well around firewalls), but my recent upgrade to Vista had rendered the app unstartable. The app would always quit on startup with the following error:

Application cannot run without client.properties file

I contacted Yugma support, and was informed that this bug was only happening to less than 1% of their Vista users, and that they were unable to reproduce — hence, there would be no fix. Undeterred, I’ve been Googling for a fix for a while now, and today happened to stumble upon this post by Alessandro Vernet with regard to getting the app up and running on the Mac. Heartened that it might simply be a missing file problem, I quickly scanned my Yugma dir (located in my userdir on C:\), but found the client.properties file right where one would expect it to be.

Next step was to run Process Monitor, one of my favorite low-level Windows debugging tools, to see what file the app was actually requesting. Turns out that many of the requests for that file were successful, but 1 request was being made on the E:\ drive for:

E:\Users\darren\AppData\LocalLow\ Yugma\properties\client.properties

Eh? Well it turns out that I had moved my Vista user dirs to another drive, and while Yugma installs to C:\Users\darren\Yugma by default, there is code in the app that seems to trust Vista with regard to where the userdir is. Well, my janky solution was to copy the entire Yugma dir to the E:\ drive location, and it worked like a charm.

I’m not sure this a long-term solution, but hopefully it will help Yugma correct the problem for other users.