1:00 AM
Paul B
We have several Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers in our environment, and the other day I noticed that I could not remote desktop into one of them. It was a Citrix XenServer VM, so I could still get into it remotely, I just had to use XenCenter to do it. Not the snappiest way to manage a server.
Anyway, when I logged in I check the Remote Desktop Service, and saw that it had stopped for some reason. I manually started it up, then tried remoting in with RDP again, and as soon as I logged in I was kicked out. The Remote Desktop Services had kicked off again. I checked the event logs and all I saw was an error saying:
The Remote Desktop Services service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 4 time(s).
You gotta love vague errors like that. Yeah, I know it terminated. Why the hell did it terminate? Well, I started Googling around, and I found a post saying it had to do with installing service pack 1, and one guy had luck by simply running updates one more time and the issue went away. This didn't work out for me. In fact, I came up with another error running updates!
This error happened when trying to install update KB2667402. I received an error with the code 8024200D. Researching that led to a forum thread where a guy said that he was getting that error too when trying to run updates, because that update was installed already. That's weird right? I mean, why would the Microsoft Update program say you needed an update that was already installed?
Well, that son of a gun was right. I checked installed updates and sure enough, that update was already installed.
So I uninstalled the update and rebooted the server and a strange thing happened after that. I COULD REMOTE IN! Yes, the Remote Desktop Service stayed running after the reboot!
After that, I re-ran updates and the KB2667402 update was detected again, and this time it installed without an issue. After another reboot, RDP is working fine! The original install of KB2667402 seems to have been corrupted, and is what caused the issues with RDP.
Are you experiencing this issue, or have you in the past? Was this the fix for you or did you handle it differently? Let us know in the comments.
