Tag Archives: sms remote control

Resetting the Permission Required flag for SMS Remote Control.

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sms2003_150x70We have a VBscript job that SMS 2003 runs weekly on all our client computers.

Amongst other things, it sets the Permission Required flag for SMS Remote Control.
In other words, it’s the "Permission Required for someone to remotely control my computer, from elsewhere".  Normally this is a good idea.

Permission Required.

After hours, one of my co-workers needed to remote control a users computer, and the user wasn’t there.

My quick solution?*

Edit the vbscript to change the flag, then remotely run the script.

Problem solved.

* Remote Registry access was broken.  And WMI was not healthy.
  (the registry key is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SMS\Client\Client Components\Remote Control\Permission Required .

The SMS Mirror Driver

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The SMS Mirror driver is the root cause of the problem, with help from a dated video driver, the SMS Remote Control application (Wuser32.exe), and an unsupported operating system (Windows 2000).

So what does the SMS Mirror Driver do?:

Video acceleration significantly speeds up your Remote Control sessions clients.  For video acceleration on clients running Windows 2000 or later, SMS uses a Mirror driver.  The Mirror driver can simultaneously display the same output to several video devices and has no dependencies on the client’s video driver.
– Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Operations Guide.

We received a fault report:

My desktop icons are grey colored.

It took some investigation, as the customer left out some details.  Here they are:

  • the problem was occurring on a system they were remote controlling with the SMS Remote Control application.
  • it was an intermittent problem.
  • it was in a development environment.

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