Ask Owen

Our company is migrating all their machines from XP to Vista and I’ve hit an issue when trying to log onto Terminal Services. I’ve even logged in as an Administrator and it *still* won’t work. How do I get this work?

I’ve passed this question to Leo from Whooah.biz who’s a bit of an infrastructure buff and deals with these sort of issues on a day to day basis. Here’s what he has to say:

The problem here is due to the way vista deals with Administrator rights. Here’s what you can do:

• Login on to the computer as Administrator.
• You will than need to select Internet Explorer, right-click and “Run as administrator”. Apparently even if you are logged in as administrator. This explicitly tells the application (IE) to run with elevated privileges. So one has to specifically select the account under the “run as” option. (The privileges required are full rights to write to the system registry and update the licensing on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSLicensing)
• You should then be able to log onto your Terminal Server

There you have it, I knew Leo could get that answered quicker than you can spell Fenphedra (well, I bet you can’t spell that very quickly). Now, one other option you might want to consider is to disable User Access Control (UAC) completely, which will also solve the problem, but I’ll leave that for another AskOwen day.

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