Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

I was sitting around today wanting to do some work on my HTPC while also watching TV. Obviously if I'm watching TV full screen it's tough to mess around with software and the like. So I started googling to see if there was any way to get a 2nd Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) session (or VNC or anything really, other than console) on XP. Well, whaddya know, but there is!

See, when MS was working on SP2 they were also touting some technology called Mira. However Mira never made it to a version 2, as MS decided (most likely due to licensing restrictions) that they didn't want to allow multiple concurrent sessions on XP. So they scrapped it.

What they DID do though was release betas and release candidates which included the ability to have concurrent sessions. And enterprising individuals have made this work on SP2 boxes. I followed the directions here and it worked beautifully. The one thing you have to remember though is that you can't have the same user logged on twice. So you have to create an additional account for each remote session you're going to have connected. I also found this page that seems to automate the process, but I didn't try that one, so use at your own risk.