SAP GUI vs. VDI - Smartcard PIN entry on launch

[mark_gorelyk]

Dear all,

has anyone encountered the issue of a windows for a smartcard PIN entry popping up when launching SAP GUI? Please refer to the screenshot attached.

Since recently (before, for more than a year, this issue did not occur), this window pops up when launching SAP GUI on a VDI. I don´t use any smart card and there is no such PIN set up. I can just cancel the window 2 times (without entering any PIN) and then SAP GUI starts. But since I execute some SAP GUI recordings on schedule automatically, closing the window manually does not resolve the issue for me.

I have been interacting with support for quite a while to resolve this and tried a lot of approaches (mostly, trying to disable the PIN entry and smartcard functionality), but nothing ever helped. I also re-installed SAP GUI multiple times and tried different versions without any success.

The only resolution proposed was to create a new VDI. I did that and on the first glance, I was able to launch SAP GUI on the new VDI without the window popping up. Then, I was on vacation for 2 weeks - and after that, the issue occured on the new VDI.

Meanwhile, when exploring the versioning information, I today found out that SAP GUI starts without the pop-up window on the old VDI again. The only change was that the old VDI was meanwhile stopped due to expiration and then extended. Not sure whether I can just rely on this as a solution - from the expirience with the new VDI, it seems like the issue can re-occur at any time.

Also, I have a colleague who uses a VDI for the very same purpose in the very same way and has never seen this issue.

My current versioning info for SAP GUI:

Local PC: File version 8000.1.7.1161, build 2234706, Patch level 7, 32bit (never saw this pop-up with any version)
Old VDI: File version 8000.1.7.1161, build 2234706, Patch level 7, 64bit (worked fine for a long time with some older SAP GUI version, then no up-to-date version I tried work, after expiration and extension works fine again)
New VDI: File version 8000.1.7.1161, build 2234706, Patch level 7, 64bit/32bit (whatever up-to-date version I try, both 32 and 64 bit, the issue occurs. After the initial set up, the 64 bit version worked fine, after a while not any more without any change to the VDI and SAP GUI)

So if anyone has encountered this issue - did you find any resolution for this? Or at least a reason why it occurs?