Remote Assistance acting like Remote Desktop

Hi Guys,

Hope you can shed some light on this one. Our service desk staff
recently reported that they can no longer use "Offer Remote Assistance"
while interactively working with the user who needs help.
Basically they go into Help and Support, select "Offer Remote
Assistance", type in the computer name or IP address of the users
machine and click connect.
At that point a drop down box shows the name of the user currently
logged onto the remote machine and they click on "Start Remote
Assistance". All good so far!

Now I don't work on the helpdesk so I've never really used this
feature, but apparently what should happen at this point is the REMOTE
user gets a dialog box pop up telling them that a user (helpdesk) is
trying to connect/do you want to let them?
What is happening though is that the remote user is NOT prompted with
anything. The helpdesk staff's screen changes to what looks like the
normal RA screen (except the buttons "take control", "Send a File",
"Settings, etc are all greyed out.. it even says "Waiting for an
Answer" on the left hand side) with one important difference- in the
middle of the screen a "Remote Desktop" (Terminal Server) style logon
dialog box appears.
If you try to log on with this dialog box, you are told that "The user
[username] is currently logged on. If you continue this users session
will end" just like a normal Remote Desktop/Terminal Server session
does!

So basically RA is now acting like RD!

Some background: All users are members of the same domain, all are
running XP Pro SP1, all on the same network segment (i.e. the machine
next to me is acting like this), the Windows Firewall is OFF for all
users, the "Allow Remote Assistance" and "Allow this computer to be
remote controlled" checkboxes are ON and the service desk users are in
the local admin group of all the workstations.
The helpdesk don't use this function all the time and hence can't tell
us exactly when this problem started to occur (apart from "Well, it
used to work till recently!) which makes it a little hard to track down
whether it's a Group Policy setting (it's certainly nothing directly on
our containers, however there are policies further up the tree
controlled by worldwide enterprise administrators which can affect us),
or a patch (we use SUS to deliver windowsupdate patches) or something
else! This happens when you use Messenger or Outlook or "Save a File"
methods as well.

I have tried the usual Google/Technet/MSKB's and found a few similar
like this one:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...50b657648e1581f


which is the exact problem, but no real answers!

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Kind Regards,

AmC.

Hi Guys,

Well even tho I got no replies to this I thought I'd post the solution
(maybe some far distant civilization will benefit from the answer!).
Basically it was a bad registry setting caused by a program
installation which breifly uses autologon. This program was included in
our SOE a few months ago and corresponds with when the problem began to
happen.

Anyway the answer (here's a regedit script for anyone who experiences
this problem):

-------------------------

REGEDIT4
rem Fix for "Remote Assistance acting like Remote Desktop" thingy..
rem *******************************************************************
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"DontDisplayLastUserName"="0"

---------------------

Cut and paste the bits between the ----'s into a text file, call it
something ending in ".reg" and run it on the "other end" (the "novice"
user I think it's called in Remote Assistance).

A value of "1" caused the problem.

Kind Regards,

AmC.