Windows 2000 Security Roll-up and Terminal Services

From: Chad Everett (ceverett@INFORMEDBEVERAGE.COM)
Date: 02/22/02


Date:         Fri, 22 Feb 2002 11:06:48 -0500
From: Chad Everett <ceverett@INFORMEDBEVERAGE.COM>
To: NTBUGTRAQ@LISTSERV.NTBUGTRAQ.COM

Hope that this is relevant here. If not, please just let me know and I'll
take it elsewhere.

I recently installed the Windows 2000 Security Roll-up on several servers
and had some troubles with Terminal Services afterwards. On one server, my
initial DC on this domain if you think that matters, I had no problems at
all. Kept chugging away. On another (member) server, terminal services
appears to have been removed as a component, as if it was never installed.
I have not yet done anything else with this server.

On the third server, terminal services just became disabled, but still
showed up as being installed. I tried rebooting, reinstalling terminal
services, even (at the suggestion of Microsoft) removing the security
roll-up. This turned out to be a bad decision as Directory Services became
corrupted and I had to reload the OS. After a few more hours, I finally got
back to where I had started, but still no Terminal Services. I'm using
Remote Administration mode. Looking at the Terminal Services Manager, the
port shows a status of "down" with a number - typically 65536-39, though it
changes when you reset the port, so that might not be the entire range.

I did some searching at Microsoft's web site, found nothing. So I finally
turned to Google, and was able to find a support article (incidentally, at
Microsoft) which gave a bit of good information on the same general subject:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q270588

In a nutshell, it says that there was a problem with rebooting too many
times to the last known good configuration. If you did this, a hardcoded
value for Terminal Services wouldn't work correctly, as it would point to
the wrong place.

This key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal
Server\VIDEO\rdpdd

Would have \Device\Video0 set to this value:
\REGISTRY\Machine\System\ControlSet001\Services\RDPDD\Device0

When it should be set to this one instead:
\REGISTRY\Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\RDPDD\Device0

The article says this problem was fixed in SP2, but I figured I could poke
around a bit, just to see if it might be the issue. Turns out that that
isn't the problem - my value there looks okay. However, in comparing this
structure to the working machine, it turns out that my non-working servers
have an additional key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal
Server\VIDEO\disc

The values in this key look like a duplicate of the other one, referenced
above (rdpdd). Being out of other ideas, I deleted this key and rebooted.
Guess what? Terminal Services (RDP) comes up, and I can use it as normal.
Anyway, wondering if anyone has seen this problem before, or if anyone might
know if I just caused more problems for myself?

Thanks.

---
Chad Everett
ceverett@informedbeverage.com

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