RDP not accepting connections

I had a nice, big, descriptive post written up, but the forum decided to let my session expire while I was posting it. ><

Remote desktop has been working just fine for me the last few months, but last Friday morning I was using Remote Desktop from work normally, but in the afternoon when I tried to log back in I could not connect. Even from inside my home network I cannot even connect to port 3389 through telnet.

I've checked that Windows Firewall has not blocked the port, I've made sure the Terminal Services service is up and running with its associated services, and I rebooted to restart the services and make sure that no other programs had malfunctioned and affected RDP somehow. The only other thing I can think of that may have started blocking it might be NAV Worm Protection, but even for Norton that's a bit of a stretch in my ind.

I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 along with the Terminal Services dll from server 2003 to allow for multiple connections.

The only thing strange I've noticed in the days leading up to this point was that after I installed UltraMon to manage the second monitor I added that Remote Desktop would connect to a new session than the one I leave running 24/7. That would cause windows to open second copies of pretty much everything running at startup [ie F@H] which would kill my CPU and not let me do anything at all. To get around this I added 'session:i:0' to my RDP settings file to force a connection to my open session. Everything was working fine like that for a week or so until the above nastiness.

Any thoughts? It's getting boring here at work not being able to surf outside the firewall. T.T

Not sure what ultramon is, but if its something like PCAnywhere, it kills some files that RD needs to work properly. Might be similiar to your problem.

UltraMon manages multiple physical displays. I don't think it touches anything to do with RDP. I think it was only causing difficulties with the sessions because it may not have been designed with RDP in mind.

You could try using VNC instead.

Have you checked the system logs on both the client and server machines? You may have a licensing issue.

I might work on upwards of 10 computers a day. I don't want to spend X amount of time installing VNC on each, not to mention they're not mine to begin with. Besides, Remote Desktop is on every single WinXP installation so I'd have to be a crazy person to use something else. I'm sure VNC is nice but I'm really reaching the end of my rope from people constantly suggesting I use it.

jwdonahue: I've checked the logs on both machines [the local ones] and the only thing I can find remotely related are alot of these on the "server" machine, but they also predate my problem and any major software changes by a fairly wide margin.


-edit-
just in case someone stumbles on this thread with a similar problem, I managed to fix it. Turns out it was Norton's Internet Worm Protection. It had been allowing the RDP conenction through for a few days, but then it randomly decided to start blocking it entirely. Strange.

There's probably a way to add the port to an exclusion list for IWP, but I just disabled it entirely.

Hi all,

I think i have just got to the bottom of this, its to do with the update that microsoft posted for the Nvidea display driver. The new update affects other applications such as Remote Desktop... Basically the driver is for XP only and not MCE machines... Solve it by rolling back too 169.21 from 175.19, its available at Nvidea.com go to drivers and look for the archives it will be posted in there.

Once rolled back, uninstall the extender and install it again. This has many reports so far of working.

Lastly to prevent it happening again, ensure you dont automatically update again or find away of denying the update from MS

Cheers,

Aaron

Welcome to Dev Shed...

You do realize that this post was over a year old...

And it was mentioned that the problem was caused by Norton Worm protection...

How do you get a display driver problem out of this anyways?

It depends on how... let's say 'invasive' the driver suite is. I know RDP has taken to crashing ATI's ridiculous Catalyst Control Center recently which, while not affecting RDP sessions, does cause some trouble once I'm back logging in physically. I don't program drivers, but I'd imagine if a driver didn't take into account remote protocols it might still attempt to control the virtual display for RDP.

And anyhow, I feel special having my post resurrected after so long.