Enabling Multiple Remote Desktop Sessions In Windows XP Professional

Up until now I have been using FreeNX on Ubuntu to enable multiple remote sessions to a central virtual machine running Wine and Office 2003 / 2007.

FreeNX has been great but I have had issues trying to access on-line templates in Word and have yet to look hard enough for a way to install service packs for Office. Ideally I wanted concurrent Remote Desktop (RDP ) sessions on Windows 7 but have settled for the following hack on Windows XP Professional (SP3) to do the job.

Note that I performed the following actions on a clean install of XP Professional SP3 (connected to a Workgroup) with Remote Desktop not yet enabled:

First download termsrv.dll (version 5.1.2600.5512).

Next make a backup of the termsrv.dll files in the following locations:

• C:\Windows\System 32\
• C:\Windows\System 32\dllcache
• C:\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386

Unzip the termsrv.dll zip file that you downloaded and copy it to the above locations. If you experience issues copying these files you may need to disable the Terminal Services service and then boot in to Safe Mode (press F8 during boot) to complete this task.

If you see the following file protection error just click Cancel:

The next step is to make some changes to the Windows Registry with the ts_multiple_sessions.zip file. Unzip the file and double click on the .bat file to make the necessary registry changes.

If you want to review the changes that this file will make before running it you can just right click it and then select Edit.

Now we just need to define the number of concurrent remote desktop connections / sessions that we want to enable. Click Start then Run and type gpedit.msc and then click OK. In the Group Policy window expand Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components and then Terminal Services in the left pane. In the right pane double click on Limit number of connections and define the number of remote desktop sessions.

To finish up we just need to make sure that we turn on Remote Desktop and enable Fast User Switching as follows.

• Click Start, Control Panel and then System. Click the Remote tab and then click the Allow users to remotely connect to this computer check-box. Keep this window open.
• In Control Panel click User Accounts. Under the Pick a task heading click Change the way users log on or off and make sure that Use Fast User Switching is enabled.

In User Accounts you can also add any additional user accounts that you want to have remote desktop access. Just make sure to that you enable these users in the Remote tab of the System window by clicking the Select Remote Users button and then adding the users one by one.

The last thing that we need to do is change the number of default TCPIP connections with EvID4226Patch223d-en.zip. Running this will enable you to change the number of TCPIP connections to 50 which will mean that if you close Remote Desktop windows (rather than logging out) you should not get the EventID 4226 (which means that you have run out of TCPIP connections).

Finally reboot the system and you are done!

Source: My Digital Life

Related posts:

Vista SP1 – Enable Concurrent Remote Desktop Sessions

Windows XP SP3 – Enabling Remote Desktop With Network Level Authentication