How To Shadow a Remote Desktop Session in Windows XP Professional (279656)

SUMMARY

Users can connect remotely to a Terminal Services session that is running on a Windows XP Professional-based server. However, in Windows XP Professional you cannot create a shadow session, where a local user and a remote user can control the same session. This article describes how to use Windows Server 2003 to create a configuration in which two users can control the same session on a Windows XP Professional-based computer.

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Connecting to a Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services Session

1. From a separate computer, open a Remote Desktop session to a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Datacenter Edition-based server. Use this session to host the connection to the Windows XP Professional Desktop session; this is also actually serving as the session to be shadowed.

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Connecting to the Windows XP Professional Desktop Session

1. From within the session that you just opened in Terminal Server, open a new Remote Desktop session to the target Windows XP Professional-based computer.
2. After this step, the original session that you opened in step 1 will appear to be the desktop of the Windows XP Professional-based computer, but in actuality, it is a session to the computer that is nested within the original session to the server. At the same time, the Windows XP Professional-based computer will exhibit the same behavior as if the desktop were connected to any other Remote Desktop session, which means that the console of the Windows XP Professional-based computer will be locked.

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Connecting to another Terminal Services Session on Windows Server 2003

1. From yet another computer, open a Remote Desktop session to the same Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Datacenter Edition-based server that you connected to in step 1. This session will be used to shadow the original session.

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Shadowing the Windows XP Professional Desktop Session

1. From within the session that you just opened on the Terminal Server, open a command prompt and use the shadow command to shadow the original session from step 1. You can get the session ID from the Terminal Services Manager utility in Administrative tools.
2. For example, if the original session were given an ID of 2, you would type shadow 2 at the command prompt within the second session that is connected to the Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server.

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Disconnecting from the Shadow Session

1. To disconnect the shadow session from the remote side, press CTRL-*(on the numeric keypad), and you will be returned to the original session that you established to the Windows Server 2003 computer. You can then close this session by using logging off from the Start menu.

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Disconnecting from the Initial Remote Desktop Session

1. The final step in this procedure is to disconnect from the nested Remote Desktop session that resides in the original session to which you connected on the Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server.
2. To do this, you use the traditional methods from the Start menu to either log off or disconnect from the session to the Windows XP Professional-based computer, and then use the exact same procedure again to log off or disconnect from the original session to the Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server.

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