Fix Remote Desktop to Win7 Media Center 1
Last fall a patch from Microsoft broke RDP access to Windows7 Media Center here. It has been a small hassle to manage the schedule of shows to be recorded ever since, but I didn’t take the time to research a fix. Until today.
Once again google was my friend today. It found this article which explained the issue and a solution. Another article had a clearer solution, which worked after trying 2 others.
Attempt 1
First, I tried the suggested from the forum moderator – to deregister and reregister the eHome DLLs. This didn’t help.
Attempt 2
Next, I removed the patch, KB2592687, as specified in the responses, but that just made the machine have boot issues. Basically, it refused to boot until I did a forced power off. The next boot worked for some reason, unknown to me. Starting up Media Center and the same old error was displayed. Removing the patch didn’t work for me.
Attempt 3
Next, I saw a specific set of registry entries related to permissions for RDP access. Seemed that everyone else said these would work. I’d already spent 15 minutes and 3 system reboots on the problem. Hacking the registry isn’t a big deal – changed and all started working again. I’d forgotten how much faster RDP was than the VNC connection throught Virt-Manager. Here are the instructions copied from the best solution in another article
Simplified in steps…
1. Regedit – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\Rdp-Tcp
2. Right Click on Rdp-Tcp \ Permissions \ Administrator Group – Give Full Control
3. Add Your Media Center User Account \ Give Full Control.
I hope this helps. I’d like to apologize for the Windows topic today.
We will return to Linux topics soon. I would point out that this 7MC instance is still running under a Linux KVM host and performing nicely as outlined here.
I’ve been writing many posts over the last 6 months, but just haven’t had time to finish each or check them for mistakes and clarity.
No Recordings
The following day I noticed that no TV programs were recorded. I’m still trying to figure out what happened, but 7MC is just saying that there is a critical error in Media Center and it cannot continue. No error number at all.
Windows7 Backups
Ok, I automated weekly backups for the system a few years ago. Let me just restore from a prior backup. Simple. Nope. Seems those backups have only be doing 1 or 2 files a week all this time. How important is restoring a desktop.ini file? What a load of crap. I was using the built-in Windows7 backup tool. The largest “backup set” is 52K – somehow I don’t think that contains all the eHome stuff at all.
I’m pissed. Isn’t a backup supposed to backup things? There are weekly backups from Sept 2012 … all relatively tiny. I’m confused. The target media has plenty of room – enough to hold 2 full bit-for-bit copies of the source system.
Clearly, I need to do more research, since there’s no way that Microsoft can be this bad.
Restore Point
Came across the Restore Point option and decided I was already screwed, so why not give it a try. Selected, confirmed, rebooted, restarted, went into 7MC and asked for a short program to be recorded. So far, it seems to have worked, except that I can’t use RDP to access 7MC anymore.
By quickly using the last registry hack above, the remote desktop access to 7MC is working again. If I guessed, I’d say that the combination of reregistering eHome stuff and removing that patch was the killer for something related to my HDHR network TV tuners. Somehow, the connection was broke between the tuner and 7MC. I know the tuner was still working – the tuner program provided with the tuner hardware was still working. It was a Media Center fault.
So, it feels like time for a system image backup to me.
Now I have to figure out how to acquire the TV show that I missed recording last night. Ah … good TV network. They post shows the following day and XBMC’s FreeCable extension has it.
All is well with the TV-watching world.