How do I get Selenium Server to launch Chrome on 64bit Windows under Jenkins with Selenium Grid?

Question

I am migrating a Selenium server environment from Windows 2008 server 32bit to Windows 2008 server 64bit. Whenever I try to run a job with Google Chrome, I get the following error message:

Error Message

Could not start Selenium session: org.openqa.grid.common.exception.GridException: 
Error forwarding the new session The server returned an error : 
Failed to start new browser session: org.openqa.selenium.os.WindowsRegistryException:  
Problem while managing the registry, OS Version '6.1', regVersion1 = falseBuild 
info: version: '2.25.0', revision: '17482', time: '2012-07-18 21:08:56'
System info: os.name: 'Windows Server 2008 R2', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '6.1', java.version: '1.7.0_11'Driver info: driver.version: unknown 

Stacktrace

java.lang.RuntimeException: Could not start Selenium session: 

org.openqa.grid.common.exception.GridException: Error forwarding the new session The server returned an error : Failed to start new browser session: org.openqa.selenium.os.WindowsRegistryException: Problem while managing the registry, OS Version '6.1', regVersion1 = falseBuild info: version: '2.25.0', revision: '17482', time: '2012-07-18 21:08:56'System info: os.name: 'Windows Server 2008 R2', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '6.1', java.version: '1.7.0_11'Driver info: driver.version: unknown
 at com.thoughtworks.selenium.DefaultSelenium.start(DefaultSelenium.java:109)   
 at edu.umich.oud.dart.bad_link_tests.TestChromeQa.setUp(TestChromeQa.java:9) 
Caused by: com.thoughtworks.selenium.SeleniumException: org.openqa.grid.common.exception.GridException: Error forwarding the new session The server returned an error : Failed to start new browser session: org.openqa.selenium.os.WindowsRegistryException: Problem while managing the registry, OS Version '6.1', regVersion1 = falseBuild info: version: '2.25.0', revision: '17482', time: '2012-07-18 21:08:56'System info: os.name: 'Windows Server 2008 R2', os.arch: 'amd64', os.version: '6.1', java.version: '1.7.0_11'Driver info: driver.version: unknown  
 at com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.throwAssertionFailureExceptionOrError(HttpCommandProcessor.java:112)     
 at com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.getCommandResponseAsString(HttpCommandProcessor.java:183)    
 at com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.executeCommandOnServlet(HttpCommandProcessor.java:118)   
 at com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.doCommand(HttpCommandProcessor.java:101)     at com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.getString(HttpCommandProcessor.java:275)  at com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.start(HttpCommandProcessor.java:237)  
 at com.thoughtworks.selenium.DefaultSelenium.start(DefaultSelenium.java:100)

I used the alternate install of Chrome that installs in Program Files (x86) and I've included both the Selenium Driver directory and directory with chrome.exe in the PATH environment variable.

The environment is as follows:

• Windows 2008 Server x64
• Java JDK 7u11
• Apache Tomcat 7.0.34
• Jenkins 1.499
• Selenium plugin for jenkins
• Selenium Grid (as part of the selenium plugin)
• Selenium server 2.25 (part of selenium plugin)
• Chrome 24
• ChromeDriver 26 (also tried the last release)
• Firefox 10 ESR

Answer 1

The Selenium IRC channel provided a hint. The browser was starting to launch, but Selenium never got a reply. After some fiddling, I was able to remote desktop into the account selenium + tomcat ran as and manually launched a grid job. Chrome was trying to setup a second desktop shortcut and do some initial first launch housecleaning. I also had to relax the permissions on C:\program files (x86)\google\chrome\application a bit.

After this, Chrome will launch on the grid as expected.