So you are still blaming concast, huh?

Suuuure, it is the computers fault...


(Nick Burns!)

Are you moving to Server 2008 anytime soon?

Too bad you aren't good enough of a friend.  I indirectly have 1500 licences of it.  (legally too).  I love the remote desktop programs protocal. We're implementing it next year at work.

The only problem with the new RDP software is that the client SUCKS.  Not "kinda" sucks, not "sorta" sucks, but "CAPS LOCK to max" SUCKS.

I don't know what Microsoft was smoking when they release the XP/2003 update of the TS6 client, but it was one of the shoddiest production releases I've seen out of them since NT4 SP6.

First, they shipped it as a Critical Update.  I'm sorry, but a variation in RDP is not a "critical" update by any stretch of the imagination.  Since they labeled it as critical, anybody running a WSUS server (like me) pushed it straight into production.  What a frickin' mess...

The first release (6.0) completely destroyed the RDP client on about 35% of the machines it was installed on.  Every time it ran, the client would somehow trigger the NX bit XP SP2 and would fire off a Data Execution Prevention message.  This would happen even on 32-bit machines that didn't have an NX-capable processor.  How the heck did they pull that one off?  Thanks for the QA, Microsoft.

I found an unsupported workaround to get past the NX errors, which would allow the RDP 6.0 client to run, but it would crash with a page fault error every time it made a connection to a terminal server or RDP server.  Again, this was on ~35% of my machines, which represents a wide variety of hardware, software, and manufacturers.  Suffice it to say that I had to roll those machines back to RDP 5.0, which was a complete pain in the butt. 

Of course, Microsoft didn't enable roll back functionality through WSUS, which meant that I couldn't uninstall the client through WSUS.  I had a choice between writing a script to uninstall the stupid program or removing it manually at either machine.  Scripting to the rescue...

For the machines that didn't have a problem with the new client (and I never did find what the heck caused the problem), the radically different interface confused the heck out of the end users.  I understand 6.0 has a lot of nifty features when used in conjunction with 2008 servers and Vista RDP endpoints, but the basic functionality of the client is identical.  Why change the interface?  What purpose does that serve but to confuse the heck out of the users?  I work with factory employees, for crying out loud, not rocket scientists!

Finally, my last rant about the client is the requirement for pre-authentication.  Instead of just connecting you to the terminal/RDP server and allowing you to authenticate through the logon screen, you're forced to provide your credentials up front before even connecting to the server.  That's not just retarded, it's powerfully retarded.  What is the point of that, outside of (once again) confusing the heck out of your user base?  Do you know how many phone calls I got about that?  It completely screws up the domain authentication factor because it doesn't read Active Directory trusts.  If your users don't understand the concept of domains (and I'm guessing 99.5% don't), God help them because the RDP client certainly won't.

-b0b
(.../rant.)

You guys are nerds!

computerjuvenile wrote on Apr 25^th, 2008 at 1:06pm:


Pre-authentication is great - when the server supports it.  Unless you're running Windows Server 2008 or have an ISA Server 2006 box sitting around, pre-authentication is pointless.  We've got an ISA server here, but it's sitting between the network and the WAN connections, not the users and the servers - just like 90% of ISA deployments.

Why didn't Microsoft include a pre-authentication check box to enable the option, instead of forcing it on everyone as a compulsory "feature."  If it had a check box, Microsoft could even add a Group Policy option to allow administrators to control the feature over the entire domain or forest.

It's a great feature when it's supported, but it's poorly implemented.

-b0b
(...suck on that!)

The forum will be going down for a few minutes tonight so I can finally get around to adding that gigabyte of RAM I bought in February.

-b0b
(...is kinda lazy.)