This was a strange problem. I have a simple Windows 2008 R2 server with remote desktop services installed. Everything was properly configured. Plenty of licenses and diagnostics reported the license server was available.
The problem? Can’t access the server through remote desktop. No errors in the logs and the only message available to me was the generic:
Did all the noob checks and I even reloaded Remote Desktop Services, removed and re-added the server to AD.
Still no access.
I installed tightvnc as I did not want to live at the machine and found I had remote access.
I checked the registry to see if port 3389 was configured and it was.
I used portqueryui to see if the port was in use and it reported:
TCP port 3389 (ms-wbt-server service): NOT LISTENING!
A quick telnet to port 3389 confirmed this.
The firewall was not running and there wasn’t a web server or any other process trying to use that port and thus block Remote Desktop Services. I was tempted to declare too much time debugging this and reload but I decided to dig around the Net a little more and stumbled on an old discussion on technet.
As mentioned in the post by itdoug; I found the hidden device driver called “remote desktop services security filter driver” disabled (You just bring up the Device Manager, select show hidden devices and look under Non-Plug and Play Drivers).
I tried to enable it and it failed. I then uninstalled it and rebooted.
Remote Desktop worked after that.
techdork 