External hard drives on Win XP block remote desktop fro

What I am running into is that when I connect one or more external hard drives to my Windows XP MCE machine and the machine reboots I can no longer connect to it using remote desktop from my Windows 7 ultimate 64-bit computer. Across the network.
If I connect the hard drives after the Windows XP MCE machine is up and running remote desktop from my Windows 7 machine works. If the machine boots with the external hard drives plugged it however my Windows 7 remote desktop application says that is initializing the connection but nothing more happens. It never connects. .
If my Windows 7 machine is attempting to connect unsuccessfully and someone pulls the hard drives out of the Windows XP MCE machine the remote desktop suddenly satisfactorily connects.
Even when the machine boots with the hard drives and therefore remote desktop is not working, these shared hard drives are visible across the network however.
. Once I try to connect with my Windows 7 machine unsuccessfully the desktop is locked up On the Windows XP MCE requiring that I cold boot.
This is the case with the one Western Digital My Book plugged directly into the USB connector on the chassis and also with several hard drives connected through a Belkin hub. I have run into motherboards that don't want to boot with external hard drives plugged in but haven't seen this pattern.

Any tips appreciated! Thank you in advance! Kevin

patwhatsthat said:

Very cool problem. It would seem that the Media Center Edition PC, when connect to the external drives is busy doing something, regarding the contents of those drives, that it doesn't want to stop doing, and susbsequently the Remote Desktop Session hangs or times out. Could be third party software that specific to media, like a codec, or player, or something maintaining some type of continuous sharing state or indexing. Have you tried to remote desktop to the XP MCE without a user logged on to it, or using another username and password forcing the current logged on user log off event. That should, if I'm guessing right, interrupt whatever is going on and allow a new logon to occur. Just a guess, actually a very interesting problem and some very good diagnostics for you have got this far in determining the cause.

I have continued to look into this. I did try halting applications which start at login as well as creating a new user as suggested above. The testing process involves a little bit of running around since computers are located in different locations and different levels of the house



When I was able to reproduce was that my remote desktop from my Windows 7 64-bit ultimate computer to the XP media Center computer was successful repeatedly as long as I did not login directly on the host computer. I have been using the same username and password of course. If I do login on the host computer directly to the next effort to connect to the computer by remote desktop hangs the system. Normally of course remote desktop or a local login would simply boot one another off back and forth. Does this match anyone's experience? I am very appreciative of the feedback