Remote Desktop + WMC stopped working

[echo14612]

I have WMC running on 3 Windows 7 x64 machines. I use Remote Desktop on my main PC in order to see my scheduled programs on all three machines on one screen. This has worked quite well for me for a long time...

...until this morning when WMC crashed in one of my remote windows. I visited the remote machine. When I opened WMC it had lost all my programing. It remembered my Series settings, though, which helped some. As of now, it's working on the host machine, ...

...however, I cannot open that WMC in the remote desktop. It crashes with this message in the details section:

Description:
Stopped working

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: CLR20r3
Problem Signature 01: ehshell.exe
Problem Signature 02: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 03: 4a5bd053
Problem Signature 04: mscorlib
Problem Signature 05: 2.0.0.0
Problem Signature 06: 4ef6c131
Problem Signature 07: 2d2b
Problem Signature 08: 79
Problem Signature 09: System.Security.Security
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033

This is all gobbledy gook to me. If somebody there can help me get Remote Desktop and WMC working together again, I'd be very grateful.

 

[George8072]

I have the same problem. I worked great since I built the WMC machine in March, then stopped recently. I found a post (Windows Media Center crashes under Remote Desktop Connection after - Microsoft Community) that says it is due to a Remote Desktop Update released in late Oct. However, when I removed the update, the problem did not resolve.

 

[George8072]

After a little digging with Sysinternals ProcMon, I found the last thing ehshell tried to do before it all went pear shaped was to try to open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\Rdp-Tcp. On my system, this key has no permissions for the local Users group, so I added that group with Read access, and now running ehshell in a RDP session works as before. (It also worked if I ran it "as administrator", but I didn't have to do that before). This meshes well with the System.Security.Security error.

 

[echo14612]

After a little digging with Sysinternals ProcMon, I found the last thing ehshell tried to do before it all went pear shaped was to try to open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\Rdp-Tcp. On my system, this key has no permissions for the local Users group, so I added that group with Read access, and now running ehshell in a RDP session works as before. (It also worked if I ran it "as administrator", but I didn't have to do that before). This meshes well with the System.Security.Security error.

This looks like great information. I found the spot in the registry, but it's not clear to me what it is I'm supposed to add to give permissions to the local users group. Could you spell it out for me please?

 

[George8072]

The registry key itself needs permissions for access.

right-click the key name Rdp-Tcp on the left treeview, in the popup menu, select Permissions. If the list does not include "Users", then click the Add button, type Users, click Ok; upon return to the permissions list, it will show the users group was added. Select the "read" permission checkbox for Users. This may not be precisely the permissions it should have had, but it got it working.

If you look in the Permissions setting for the other sub-keys of WinStations (like Console), there is a special set of permissions granted for Users that require you dig deeper into the Advanced method of selecting permissions. I may experiment with this sometime.

 

[echo14612]

The registry key itself needs permissions for access.

right-click the key name Rdp-Tcp on the left treeview, in the popup menu, select Permissions. If the list does not include "Users", then click the Add button, type Users, click Ok; upon return to the permissions list, it will show the users group was added. Select the "read" permission checkbox for Users. This may not be precisely the permissions it should have had, but it got it working.

If you look in the Permissions setting for the other sub-keys of WinStations (like Console), there is a special set of permissions granted for Users that require you dig deeper into the Advanced method of selecting permissions. I may experiment with this sometime.

Thank you, George! You have uncovered a whole new layer of information I previously knew nothing about.