Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection

(Terminal Service Client 6.0)

(Applies to Windows XP only)

For those of you who use Remote Desktop to manage your servers, and, let’s face it that’s most of us who use Windows servers, the updated version of the RDP client is causing some irritation among IT professionals by making the process of logging onto the servers more convoluted.

Basically, Microsoft have, in their wisdom, decided to force you to enter your server’s credentials BEFORE connecting to terminal services. It quite often then inserts a useless string such as “server_name\login” where just the login will suffice, forcing you to correct it.

There is, however, a cure for all this timewasting: remove version 6.0 entirely and go back to using the perfectly adequate version 5.1.

To do this, uninstall RDC 6.0 from Control Panel | Add / Remove Programs.  Check the box “Show Updates”, locate “Update for Windows XP (KB925876)” and uninstall.