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June 16, 2005

Troubleshooting Remote Desktop for XP

I recently got Remote Desktop working so I could remotely manage my server at home. Needless to say, it was much harder than Microsoft would have you believe. You should make sure your Internet Connection Firewall(ICF) is set to allow exception for Remote Desktop on port 3389. (Start - Settings - Control Panel - Security Center - Windows Firewall. Turn the firewall on, and on the Exceptions tab, check the box next to Remote Desktop, click Edit, and verify it is set up for port 3389. Set up port forwarding in your router to allow TCP traffic on Port 3389. Microsoft recommends you run it through a VPN tunnel, but I'm not doing that. I could never get my VPN tunnel to work, so I'm using an RDP tunnel, and it works fine, except for the known Man-In-The-Middle(MITM) vulnerabilities.

In any event, I have had it working for about a month. Then, about a week ago, for some reason, it began to function sporadically. I kept getting the error message:

"The client could not establish a connection to the remote computer."

After some troubleshooting, I decided that, if I rebooted my server, it would allow me to connect once and only once. Then, once I disconnected, I could never reconnect, until the server was rebooted again. So, I searched the web for this problem, and this seems to be the closest to describing my problem. They claim it's caused by Webroot's Spysweeper, which I am running. They also mention that the error messages are logged in the Event Viewer.

I went to Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Event Viewer, and, lo and behold, I found the error messages from the failed Terminal Services(RDP) connection attempts. However, the message seem somewhat cryptic.

"Terminal Server session creation failed. The relevant status code was 0xC0000037."

I searched for this error message and found this which also seems to describe my problem. Everyone is pointing the finger at Webroot's Spysweeper. This guy claims they have a fix, but I could never get it to work, so I just unistalled the garbage, and now my Remote Desktop works correctly. Spysweeper was pretty nice, but who needs the aggravation? Plus, it's rented software. You are buying an "annual license", then it expires after a year, and you have to renew your "lease". Freaking sucks.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 16, 2005 at 9:50 PM

Comments

I've posted this here before, but it's worth repeating:

One of the reasons I like Spybot S&D is that, as of the last time I checked, it's the only free spyware removal program that can be set to update itself, scan, and run quietly in the background.

Simply create a batch file with the following two lines:

cd "C:\Program Files\Spybot - Search & Destroy" [or whatever the path is]

spybotsd /autoupdate /autocheck /autofix /autoclose /autoimmunize /taskbarhide

and use Windows' automatic task scheduler to run it on a regular basis. I set it to "when computer has been idle for more than 10 minutes," but updating once a day or week (at zero dark thirty) should be fine.

Thanks to cybergibbons for that tip.


One thing I've found out is that if you change your Windows password, you will probably have to re-enter it in the Task Manager properties, so the program will have permission to run.

I created the folder C:\Tasks, and created a batch file called Spybot.bat, with the following code:


cd "C:\Program Files\Spybot - Search & Destroy\"

spybotsd /autoupdate /autocheck /autofix /autoclose /autoimmunize /taskbarhide


date /T >> C:\Tasks\Spybotrun.txt

time /T >> C:\Tasks\Spybotrun.txt

echo. >> C:\Tasks\Spybotrun.txt

echo. >> C:\Tasks\Spybotrun.txt

The first two lines cause Spybot to update and run automatically in the background.

The next two lines write the date and time into a file called "Spybotrun.txt," so I can verify that it actually did run when scheduled.

The last two "echo" lines are simply returns, so that there is a space between the date/time lines in the text file.

Posted by: Robert on June 17, 2005 at 8:18 AM

I just got an e-mail from MS tech support that is supposed to fix the Spy Sweeper problem.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Webroot\SpySweeper]
"sos"=dword:00000002

I don't have Spy Sweeper so I haven't given it a try but it doesn't look like it can hurt anything.

Posted by: Arnold on August 23, 2005 at 9:59 PM

I have exactly the same symptoms as everyone who has written related comments here, but I do not have Webroot SpySweeper installed.

Is there anything Webroot related that may have got installed inadvertently via some other app, or am I just barking up the wrong tree..

Posted by: Sanjay on December 11, 2005 at 5:36 PM

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