Thomas M. Turner's Tech Ramblings  

Final revision:

Back in August 2004, when Microsoft released SP2 for Windows XP, I found that many (but not all) of my patched PCs were no longer accepting Remote Desktop connections. The error message was simply this:

"The remote computer has ended the connection."

Many hours of investigation and testing resulted in no definitive answers. Months went by and several people were e-mailing and posting on various newsgroups and forum boards about the same problem, but no one seemed to know what the cause was. One workaround was to copy back the termsrv.dll file from SP1, but clearly that was not desirable in the long term.

Eventually, it came to light that the cause of the problem was having the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Mup\DisableDFS registry value set to 1 and that setting it back to the default value of 0 fixed the problem.

Nearly a year after SP2 was released, Microsoft came out with a hotfix and workaround information (KB898713).

Posted by Tom at 12:13 PM links to this post