I’ve got a vexing problem using Remote Desktop with one of my PCs.
The problem child is my Gateway MX6448 laptop, Ziggy. When I try connecting to it via Remote Desktop from either of my other 2 WindowsXP computers, the connection will go through and then almost immediately everything will freeze, and after a little while, I’ll get a message saying the connection was lost and it will retry 20 times. I’ve never bothered to let all 20 iterations go through, because there’s no reason the connection should drop in the first place.
I thought the problem might be Wi-Fi based, so I brought Ziggy upstairs and plugged it directly into the router. No difference. I thought it might be ZoneAlarm interfering with things, so I disabled ZoneAlarm. No difference.
I’ve checked the Remote tab on the System control panel, and it is configured to allow Remote Desktop. My user account is an administrator, so that’s not it. I can remote desktop from either of the other desktops to the other one, so I know they’re set up right. (One desktop, Landru, has Media Center, like Ziggy, the other, Albus, has plain old XP Pro; all are SP2 unless the SP3 fairy visited me in the middle of the night.)
I could swear I had this problem once when I was first using Remote Desktop, and solved it fairly quickly, but I’m tapped out on this one.
I don’t think I’ve ever been able to RD into this laptop.
My next step is going to be to turn RD off then try to access it and see if the result looks any different. I’m also going to try logging in remotely as a different user. I know Windows well enough to know that sometimes the little check box lies.
My .02 cents worth, download and install the free version of hamachi virtual networking software and ultra VNC.
install hamachi, create a network, have both machines join it.
install vnc on both, if you have the server running by default on both you can just exit server and fire up viewer to log into the other machine. The hamachi client kindly displays the ip addy of all machines on the network for quick and easy reference.
If you actually get logged in and see your desktop, as your OP seems to indicate, the problem is definitely not in the firewall settings. Am I correct in interpreting your OP to say that you actually successfully get an RDP connection and see graphics from the remote computer? If you do, then it seems that something on the remote computer is probably actively killing the connection after it succeeds. The only thing I would suggest is checking the event logs, as the terminal services processes generally spit out an event when they forcibly terminate you for whatever reason.
Another thing to try as a test, assuming it’s not a basic connectivity issue like the firewall, is to create a new account, put it in the Remote Desktop Users group, and log on as that user (log on once on Ziggy’s console first just to make sure its profile is created and all that). Just in case your normal account has some wacky setting or autostart program that’s causing you to get logged off (longshot, but it’s possible).
I’ve considered putting VNC on it as a last resort. I have to put the VNC viewer on Landru anyway so I can remote to my Linux box, but I hate the idea of installing software on a machine to do something the machine is already capable of doing. Do I really need hamachi (whatever that is)? I’m on a real network, why do I need to create a virtual one?
Yep. I see the wallpaper load and on a good day, I’ll even see the desktop populate with icons, because occasionally I’ll think “Oh, goodie! It worked!” and double click on something. As mentioned in the OP, I know it’s not the firewall because I turned that off and still got the same behavior.
I’ll definitely check that.
Yeah, I always create a secondary admin account on XP machines in case something goes screwy with my regular account. I meant to try that last night and got sidetracked doing other stuff. Thanks!