Please help me get Remote Desktop to work.

[Dodo Bird]

I'm trying to connect through the web browser IE8 to XP Prof host PC. With
the ActiveX plugin running I select the desired resolution and click on the
connect button. A window then pops up that asks some questions related to
printer/file sharing and when I click its connect button a border of a window
appears momentarily in the browser and then the ActiveX remote login web page
comes back. No error message of any kind is given.

I have followed all the steps to the letter on enabling RD support on host
PC. For example, I read and followed this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/northrup_03may16.mspx

On the server side I have disabled windows firewall and My McAfee personal
firewall has all IP and ports enabled for IIS and I also added a rule that
permits RDP. I also tried disabling that firewall too.

I have IIS and WWW serivces installed and port changed from 80 to 50000. I
have a linksys 54GL router which forwards ports 443. 3389 and 50000 to my
host pc, whose local IP is 192.168.1.100

I just don't get it. All the research I've done says it should work but it
instantly closes (doesn't even ask me for username/password) and returns to
the IE screen that asks for server and screen size. Without any error
messages. Has anyone run into this?

 

[Anteaus]

After battering my head on the wall a few times trying to get RD to work
reliably (and generally not succeeding!) I use VNC to manage servers these
days. Much simpler to setup, and more reliable. Plus which it works for
Linux/Mac as well as Windows.

Only proviso is that as the password strength on VNC is poor, it is best to
use a tunnelling service such as SSH or Zebedee to encrypt the connenction.
You can sort that side out once you've got the basic connection working,
though.

Plain VNC is somewhat slower than RD, but that is fixed if you install the
Mirage driver on the host.