Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 remote desktop issues or "Stop looking at me!!!"

I occasionally get asked to enable Remote Desktop on a Windows 7 machine that does not normally include the feature (Home Premium). Enabling the feature is pretty straightforward and allows for easy remote management of the computer for advanced users.

Jordan Hopfner has a terrific article on his blog for enabling Remote Desktop on Windows 7 Home Premium (either 32 or 64 bit). Download the ZIP file here, extract the contents to a folder, and run the "install.cmd" file as an administrator.

This worked fine for me for almost 2 years. But recently, I began to hear about issues connecting to machines patched this way. Remote Desktop clients would connect to the machine, but would disconnect again almost immediately right before the login screen would be displayed. It seems to be related to an issue with the local session manager.

Contributor "BobX" over at Windows Seven Forums posted the solution here - uninstall the Windows patch KB2984972 - "Update for RDC 7.1 to support restricted administration logons on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2".

After following Bob's directions to uninstall the update, Remote Desktop began working again.

UPDATE: There are also reports of the Windows update KB3003743 also breaking Remote Desktop, but hat has not been my experience yet.

HP Installer Setup has stopped working or "My kingdom for a decent error message!"

I was recently called upon to install a new HP Color Laserjet M476nw at an employee's home office.  Unfortunately, after downloading the latest drivers & software from the HP website, I ran the isntaller and received one of the top 5 most annoying and generic errors of Windows 7:

"HP Installer Setup has stopped working"

Now, don't get me wrong, I appreciate that Windows didn't decide to just blue-screen and dump me to a DOS prompt, but you'd think it could provide just a _small_ amount of additional information without forcing me into the Event Logs.  After over an hour of troubleshooting, installing, reinstalling, and Googling,   I finally found the following recommendation buried here.

Go to “Control Panel”, “Programs and Features”, “Turn Windows features on or off” and mark “.NET Framework 3.5.1”.

Once I enabled the .NET framework inside Windows 7, the installer completed without errors. Hopefully this tip will save you some time.

Down-under Terminal Server connection woes 2 - or "What's love (of encryption) got to do with it?"

What's in a name?  What's in a service pack?  Two (almost) identical questions when it comes to the world of Microsoft - for all Microsoft updates are not the same.

In my testing of the Windows 2008 R2 SP1 terminal server issue described in the previous post, it came upon me to test to a different terminal server - but one still located in the same subnet as the problematic one.  This revealed something very interesting.

If I used a Windows 2008 R2 (base) terminal server, I could not re-produce the issue from the same client that I was getting with Windows 2008 R2 SP1.

So, this puts us back to a very interesting question then.  What is it about the SP1 install that causes our client to only be able to connect once and only once?  This was the question that I was going to have to resolve.

(to be continued again...)

Down-under Terminal Server connection woes - or "Throw another protocol error on the Barbie!"

Recently, I've had to deal with a rather bizarre terminal server issue.  At this one location, no computer could connect to a specific terminal server twice.  The computers could connect fine one time.  But, if the user logged off or disconnected, and then tried to connect to the terminal server again, the following error was displayed each time:

Your Remote Desktop sessions has ended.  The connection to the remote computer was lost, possibly due to network connectivity problems.  Try connecting to the remote computer again.  If the problem continues, contact your network administrator or technical support

Of course, you would think 'orphaned session' or a terminal server setting, but that was not the case.  No limits were set and I could see the users' sessions disconnecting just fine from the server.  The first connection would work fine until the user logged off the terminal server or was disconnected.  Once that happened, the user could not sign in again with the above error.

But here's the trick:  If I rebooted the server or the firewall at the location, the users could connect again - but again, only once, then another reboot would be required.

So after confirming the usual suspects like DNS, AD account status, and VPN tunnels were all active and working normally, I decided the issue had to be something deeper.  I found the following error in the Terminal Server's System Event Log:

"Event 56, TermDD - The Terminal Server security layer detected an error in the protocol stream and has disconnected the client."

This little Event ID led down a real rabbit-hole of blog posts, forum discussions, and random Microsoft KB articles.  Let me give you some of the highlights:

• Reduce the encryption level of the terminal server to Low & use "RDP Encryption"
• Set the RDP encryption algorithm to balance network & memory usage
• Enable 'keep alive' on the terminal server
• Disable TCP Chimney Offload, Receive-Side Scaling State (RSS), and NetDMA
• Confirm RDC client version is the latest on all clients
• Use "ERR.EXE" to analyze the last word byte of the above error (B50000D0 in this case)

No one online seemed to have the final solution and none of the suggestions helped me.  I put everything back the way it was, pulled my head away from the wall, and decided to just get down and dirty with a Wireshark trace.  Hopefully the trace would help figure out exactly what was happening with these failed connections.  Running a quick client trace gave me some errors but nothing definite.  Wireshark did report some checksum errors and this "dissector bug":

"Dissector bug, protocol T.124 proto.c:3478 failed assertion (guint)hfindex < gpa_hfinfo.len) unregistered hf!"

The checksum errors led me down the hardware stack to the network cards, turning off the "checksum offload" at the IP & TCP levels on the virtual host & virtual server.  This cleared up some of the Checksum errors in Wireshark but still the same terminal server error persisted.

I was still not convinced that the Sonicwall at the location wasn't to blame for all this.  After all, we had other network issues with a business application at that same location which had still not been fixed.

Bruised and beaten, I elected to open support tickets with Sonicwall and Microsoft and begin working this issue from each end with them....

(To be continued...)