When talking about application compatibility and mitigations, virtualization is almost always mentioned as part of the discussions. This could be machine virtualization or application virtualization. And, to tell you the truth, the application virtualization part is one that I, and many others, are really trying to sort out. For me, the challenge is that it appears to depend on having an entire infrastructure set up. While I would like to just set up an application bubble and just poke at it to see how it is implemented, setting up that infrastructure to do so has simply exceeded the amount of free time I have in a day (even if I put my phone on mute and work during conference calls ... oops, did I say that out loud?). So, I really rely on others for this information.
One question that came up along the way: can you shim a SoftGrid application?
The others (who I was depending on) poked around a bit, and they ended up saying no.
However, just the other day, yet another other said yes. This person indicates that the trick is to run sdbinst.exe with each SoftGrid package that you pull down, reapplying the fix each time within the SoftGrid bubble.
So, I've now had to replace my "I have no idea if you can shim SoftGrid virtualized apps, but from what I've heard you can't" with "I have no idea if you can shim SoftGrid virtualized apps, but from what I've heard you can." It's still hearsay, but at least I got some directions for you to try. For those of you already working on things, though, since I had a set of directions, I figured I'd share what I've heard, rather than saying "you need to wait until I try it before I report on it" - which is normally what I try to do, but in this case, it could still be a while...
Updated 01-May-2008
I've been pointed to this KB article for an example of how to script something into a Softgrid virtualized app: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939896.