I usually have lots of Terminal Server sessions open when I’m working, both direct sessions but also “sessions in sessions”. In order to keep overview on my desktop I prefer to make the session size as big as possible without being full screen (so keep my local taskbar visible).

If I run a session in a session I do this again, this makes switching sessions very easy and you can always see which session you are in:

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So I will be attending the Tech-Ed EMEA in Barcelona, maybe some of you are going too?

It would be nice to meet some of my readers, so maybe I’ll see you there!

I had an application that crashed when opening the Help Topics entry from the Help menu. A trace with Process Monitor showed that it was opening a help (.chm) file. Using Explorer I could normally open the Helpfile so thas was strange. Process Monitor did not reveil any ACCESS_DENIED or other problems.

I did notice that ieframe.dll was being accessed several times and some further debugging revealed that a dll in the application directory was loaded (psapi.dll). This is strange because psapi.dll resided in the windows\system32 folder normally. Also the copy in the application directory was an old version (4.0.1371.1).

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Well it took some time but I patched Terminal Server for Windows 2008 to allow unlimited sessions in Remote Administration mode.

This patch is for 32 bit English version. In order to install it you need to perform the steps below. Before you start please check if using this patch is allowed according to your country’s law and your license agreement.

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EDIT: Please read the Desktop Icons, hide, show, prevent rename or delete article, it may be a better solution!

One of my customers recently asked if it was possible to preven the user from renaming or deleting the My Documents icon on the desktop.

If you know that deleting the icon from the desktop doesn’t really delete the My Documents folder from disk but just hides the icon then it’s obvious that it must be some kind of registry setting.

So I fired up Process Monitor from Sysinternals and deleted the icon. This showed that after deleting the icon changed registry keys at the following location:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\ClassicStartMenu\

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As a followup to the previous article:

It might be better to just Exclude taskmanager because settings the Flag value to 0 might disable multi monitor support. To do this Create a new REG_SZ (string) under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Citrix\CtxHook\AppInit_Dlls\Multiple Monitor Hook and name it Exclude. It’s value should be taskmgr.exe (case sensitive!).

I’ve also seen some issue where starting a Remote Desktop (RDP) session from within a Citrix session has some troubles with the RDP client’s window (the window “sticks” to the upper left corner or cannot be maximized). So it might be a good idea to include mstsc.exe as well in the Exclusion list (seperate values with ;).

The issues seem to have appeared with Hotfix Rollup 2.

Today I noticed something strange: on a Citrix (Presentation Server 4.5) server taskmanager does not show anything in the applications tab.

I tested this on the other Citrix Servers in the farm and they all had the same problem (and non Citrix servers did not). As you might know taskmanager fills the applications tab by enumerating all top level windows. That’s why I suspected Citrix because it places several hooks (multi monitor support, speedscreen etc.).

Turned out that by setting the Flag value of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Citrix\CtxHook\AppInit_Dlls\Multiple Monitor Hook from 4 to 0 fixed the issue.

As you might know Windows 2003 Server accepts at most 2 concurrent Terminal Server sessions (and 1 console session) in Remote Administration mode (which is the default). Of course if you switch to Application Mode you can have an unlimited number of sessions but this requires licenses and a license server.

When Terminal Server creates a new session it checks if the new session is either a console session or a help assistant session and if not it allocates a license. The function that performs this check is called CRAPolicy::Logon Read the rest of this entry »

Most administrator will want to prevent normal users from opening Regedit and a command prompt. Usually this is done by activating the “Prevent access to registry editing tools” and “Prevent access to the command prompt” policy settings. They are located under User Configuration | Administrative Templates | System:

Activating the policies will set the matching keys in the registry:

If we try to open regedit we are denied access:

So how does this work? Read the rest of this entry »